Kill Me in Yokohama by Earl Norman (Burns Bannion #3)

This is number three in the Burns Bannion series and the first one available for Kindle. All books in the series published to date are available at Google Books and B&N Nook. My reviews  of the first two books can be found here: Kill Me in Tokyo, Burns Bannion #1, Kill Me in Shimbashi, Burns Bannion #2.

My fondness of these books continues but I didn't enjoy this one quite as much as the previous two. It is still a fun read but I'd rate it four stars rather than five.

Kill Me in Yokohama picks up after the events in book two, Kill Me in Shimbashi. Burnsie is getting serious about his illegal private detective business but has to fly under the notice of Inspector Ezawa of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police who threatens to have him deported if he steps out of line. Bannion's solution is an anonymous newspaper ad for his services:

Will Do Anything for Money —

Repeat—anything! Write to

Box 113 Tokyo Central Post Office

This is Burnsie's idea of avoiding notice.

The ad pays off and Burns gets a response inviting him to meet at the Phoenix Lounge Bar. About his potential client Bannion notes:

The stationary was of good quality. The penmanship indicated a woman, and the sandlewood scent meant a real woman.

Arriving at the bar, Bannion is accosted by a drunk German representative of a chemical company. Brushing him off, he spots a beautiful (naturally) woman he takes to be his client but also notes a man at a nearby table who is also watching her. ...he looked for all the world like Mr.Moto playing Peter Lorre playing Mr. Moto. You might not know that Peter Lorre actually played the Japanese detective Mr. Moto  in films. If you are a person of a certain age this gives you an immediate mental image of what this guy looks like. I thought this an amusing description given I'm that person of a certain age. The client is Mariko Melson, one of Japan's top fashion models. She has a younger brother who has fallen under the influence of an older man who has a scheme to capture the world. She wants the man to leave Japan though Bannion figures she really means she wants him gone, dead or alive. Bannion accepts and, with three key figures now identified, another thrilling adventure is locked in and the reader knows that a simple case will turn out to be bigger, more complicated, more deadly, and will have Bannion fighting for his life.

The first three books in the series have all had their jumping off point in bars. It will be interesting to see if that continues.

This series continues the non-PC style set in the first two books with sexist attitudes and asian stereotypes. Bannion has yet to meet a woman he cant spend paragraphs describing in lush detail. But, honestly, I think the author was playing up those aspects deliberately. I think a case can be made that the author is parodying the hardboiled detective and men' adventure thrillers. But as I point out in the reviews of books 1 and 2, the Japanese women hold their own against Bannion's advances which further make me think the author is playing with stereotypes. After all, Norman was an old Asian hand, living in Japan for many years and I'm sure knew his subjects well. The author does give Bannion a boost in maturity here. In the previous book, Kill Me in Shimbashi, Bannion's, pursuit of a teenage ponytail chick, Toni-chan, almost cost him his life. Here he muses to himself, I had decided to go back to being my age. A small step but it makes him less creepy.

Being a long time fan of the hardboiled detective, I love the way the author plays with Bannion's accidental detective. He frequently makes self-deprecating about his detecting. I don't know how his trench coat has survived three adventures. And like all good hardboiled detectives, Bannion has a white knight side; there is a woman who needs saving. There is some poignancy about that woman in this book. She's a side character but Norman uses her to make a point.

The karate action continues to be well done and for Bannion, ranks at least as high as his interest in women. He gets in trouble because of women and karate saves his life. Here Bannion gets to use a karate technique mentioned in the previous books.

The reason I dropped this book a star is that the big problem behind the simple case is weak. Burns didn't react when Mariko said that the older man influencing her brother had a scheme to capture the world which turns out to be mostly true though only a particular aspect of the world. It had me going Wait, how could you not pick up on that!. The way it is laid out doesn't seem like it would have much of a chance of succeeding much being sustainable. But perhaps that is just the way of scheming megalomaniacs. Also, the younger brother acts like a hip young western cat who's seen too many American movies. He speaks almost entirely in slang. Annoyance with the brother may just be a factor of the time span between when the book was written and reading it today but is a bit much and, I think, mostly played for laughs.

We're also getting a feel for the relationship between Bannion and Inspector Ezawa. While Ezawa threatens to have Bannion deported in every conversation, I'd say he also looks at Bannion as a useful idiot. Give him on a long leash and see what he stirs up. Then yell at him but claim credit for solving the case.

So, 50+ years later, I'm the Burns Bannion books are fun to read and a little subversive toward the hardboiled detective/men's adventure thriller genres.

The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo

The Honjin Murders was serialized in a Japanese magazine in 1946. My copy also has a 1973 copyright which I guess is when it was published as a book. The English translation by Louise Heal Kawai was published in 2019.

I usually read hardboiled detective and noir stories but this is an old school, golden age style, locked room mystery and I found it a fun book to read and a style I'll probably dip back into occasionally.

The "honjin" in the title refers to an inn that served only nobility and as descendants of the owners of such a honjn, the well-to-do Ichiyanagi family has a high social rank. The heir and eldest son, Kenzo, has insisted on marrying a schoolteacher, Katsuko, against the wishes of his family. On their wedding night, everyone is awakened by screams and wild music from a kobo, a traditional string instrument. 

Rushing to the estate Annex where the couple is staying, the building is found to be locked tight. After breaking a shutter, the men enter and discover Kenzo and Katsuko stabbed to death. No one is found in the building and with no footprints in the snow everyone is mystified at who could have killed the couple and escaped. To further confuse matters, the murder weapon, a katana, is found outside with the blade buried in the ground.

This is a high profile case and soon police officers and detectives are on site. Katsuko's uncle and father figure, Ginzo, thinks something funny is going on with the Ichiyanagi family and sends for a private detective he previously sponsored in America, put through college,  and helped get started with his detective agency in Japan. This detective is Kosuke Kindaichi who has been able to solve many complex cases and is something of a national figure. He considers Ginzo his uncle and comes right away. With Kosuke's arrival, the game is afoot.

This is a locked room mystery which makes it is not only a whodunnit but a howdunnit. Something I didn't expect but enjoyed is that the author has his narrator talking about classic detective novelists and the locked room mystery. John Dickson Carr is much appreciated by the narrator. This should not be a surprise because Yokomizo is known as the Japanese John Dickson Carr.  The author also mentions one of my favorite, if not well known outside of classic mystery fans, locked room stories, The Red House Mystery by A.A. Milne. There is even a chapter titled A Conversation About Detective Novels.

Katsuko is nothing like anyone's expectations for a private detective. He is young, has a slight stammer, an untidy appearance, and a disheveled shock of hair. About his methods he is quoted:

The police investigate footprints and look for fingerprints. I take the results of these investigations and by piecing together all the available information logically, I am able to reach a conclusion. These are my methods of deduction.

As he told Ginzo, in an investigation he'd use his head rather than a tape measure and magnifying glasses. He's a little like Hercule Poirot, he solves crimes with his little grey cells. 

Unlike what you find with most hardboiled detectives, Katsuko is fully embraced by the detectives on the case and made part of the investigation. The police are not portrayed as fools but see the facts differently.

I didn't see the solution coming so I am reluctant to go into details about the investigation to avoid spoiling it for the reader. but I can say that Katsuko is an engaging character and great fun to watch work. The story is well plotted with interesting twists and turns and revelations. This is thoroughly enjoyable and highly recommended especially if you like a good, solid, classic detective novel. Katsuko features in 76 more detective novels but I think only one other has been translated, The Inugami Curse.

The book is a translation from the Japanese and I think Louise Heal Kawai has given it a good smooth flow. I probably wouldn't have known that it was written in a different language just from reading. Making a book easily accessible outside of its native language is such a creative endeavor that the translator is rightly up there with the author.

The Kept Woman by Mack Reynolds

I grew up reading Mack Reynolds' science fiction and was intrigued when Fiction Hunter Press published The Kept Woman. Apparently Reynolds' publisher asked him for some sex books and this is one of the five he wrote. It was published in 1963.

I didn't know what to expect when reading this book but I think it holds up surprisingly well. In large part, this is due to Reynolds being a good writer and he doesn't dumb down his writing because the story has a sex theme.

 Joanne (Jo) Cotton and her fiancé, Jack, each inherit $5,000 from her godmother. Jack wants to use the money to put a downpayment on a house and start moving up the social ladder in Cuma Indiana. Jo wants to live, travel the world, have fun, be a bum. Jack reluctantly agrees that Jo should use her inheritance to travel Europe and get it out of her system while he will invest his half in the company he works for, Cuma Tabulators. He's convinced she'll return, take her old secretarial job, and they'll get their big house on Watson Hill.

Jo heads for Europe where she lives the expatriate life, hanging with jet setters, invited to Scottish castles and yachts. Then a year later, she wakes up and realizes that she's broke. Drowning her sorrows in the hotel bar, Jo meets Mike Lapine, a wealthy business man from Scranton PA, in Europe on doctor's orders to relax which he doesn't seem able to do. Mike makes Jo an offer. He'll support her lifestyle and she will teach him to relax and blend in with Europeans. And so she becomes a kept woman, enduring Mike's clumsy animalistic sex and in return she continues to have clothes, travel, and the society she loves.

I said above that Reynolds didn't dumb down his narrative just because he was writing a sex book. In other writing Reynolds had socioeconomic and sociological themes and that carries over here. Added to that is his own experience living outside the US.

Reynolds starts off with a sly nod to IBM. Jack works for Cuma Tabulating. IBM began as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording company. If that is too subtle, the place to live in Cuma is Watson Hill. and Thomas J. Watson was chairman and CEO of IBM.

Businessman Mike Lapine is loud, boorish, insulting to everyone not an American, and believes that puling out a roll of bills will solve anything. He's the stereotypical ugly American, convinced America does everything better but actually pretty ignorant about everything. Jo has her work cut out trying to put at least a veneer of culture on Mike. At one point she schools on currency valuation when he begins a rant about the almighty dollar. This does two things: we see that Jo has a brain despite the impression you might have about someone willing to barter her body; and Reynolds inserts a bit of economic reality. 

Reynolds himself lived outside of the US for over ten years and so was familiar with the expatriate life. He supported himself with his writing which included articles about his travels. I think there is a little bit of Reynolds' in the struggling free lance travel writer, Bart McGivern, who Jo meets on Majorca Reynolds, like Bart, wrote travel pieces to support himself. Bart's writing becomes a fun little sub plot in the novel and take a poke at writers thinking that one day the will write The Great American Novel. And Reynolds being the kind of writer he is, we get a short lesson on the economics of being a freelance commercial writer.

Eventually Jo is confronted with her past, present, and future and needing to decide what will make her happy.

While The Kept Woman has a strong sexual theme, it is more than perky bosoms, bottoms, shapely legss, and  hot thrusting loins though those do figure into the story aplenty. Rather Reynolds has taken a sex book and infused it with intelligent observations and commentary and given us a female character who is a lot more than a gold digging bimbo. It holds up very well after 50+ years and would only require adding mobile phones and an increase in the amount of money needed to live the expatriate life to bring it up-to-date. It's a fun book and has inspired me to look up more of Reynolds' writing.

Review: Kill Me in Shimbashi by Earl Norman (Burns Bannion #2)

Published by Fiction Hunter Press in epub format for Google Play and B&N Nook.

The Burns Bannion books are the closest thing I have to a guilty pleasure. They aren't great examples of crime fiction and they are cringe-worthy toward women by todays standards but they are a lot of fun to read. They are unabashedly men's adventure thrillers from a different time and I look at them in that context and just go with the flow of sex and over-the-top karate action and enjoy them immensely. Besides, Burnsie and I go back around 50 years as I relate in my review of Kill Me in Tokyo.

This second outing for Bannion picks up picks up right after the events in Kill Me in Tokyo. Inspector Ezawa of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police gives Burns an ultimatum, get a permanent place to live, get registered with the local ward office, and get enrolled in university or get out of Japan. Bannion very much does not want to leave Japan:

I had my own good reasons for wanting to stay on in Japan—thousands of them, and cute ones, tripping up and down the Ginza any time of day—and I wanted to make a more intensive study of Karate, that deadly art which had also proved a lively and handy one during my career as a private eye.

One of the "cute ones" Bannion is pursuing mentions Harry's Bar before giving him the slip. Hoping for a reunion,  Bannion  heads to Harry's Bar where indeed he finds Tamiko or Tami as she likes to be called.  Apparently she "belongs" to a gangster named Kindo which promises to complicate Bannion's plans for Tami. This sets into motion one of the subplots, namely rescuing Tami from the clutches of Kindo. Burns also meets a Marine, Bill Barkentine, a former POW who was captured by the Imperial Japanese Army in 1942 when they attacked a train in China on which Barkentine was guarding a shipment.

Barkentine offers Bannion a much needed infusion of cash to find the shipment he was guarding, the bones of the Peking Man. Barkentine figures they are worth a fortune. By coincidence (Tami's grandfather is a renowned archeologist, anthropologist, and geologist) and research, Bannion is on the trail of the missing bones and having to deal with gangsters, their own karate men, and cultists who seem to have something to do with the bones, while hoping his karate skills will keep him alive.

I've been thinking about why the Burns Bannion books appeal to me. Certainly part of it has to do with me having encountered them for the first time as a young soldier in an Asian country. Reading them again after all these years I see an author who had a good time writing a particular type of book — male oriented adventure. Along the way he has his Bannion poking fun at the way he does and doesn't fit the role of hardboiled detective à la Philip Marlowe. While Bannion is an unrepentant horndog the women are no pushovers. For example:

Brother you sure got no polite custom, American man supposed to have some polite custom to woman!

...I began the usual Bannion approach. Toni-chan said sharply "Hey you can fool around second floor, but nobody home downstair!"

And when Bannion finally does score, after some bodily explorations there is a fade to black leavig what happened to the reader's imagination, no explicit sex.

Norman also writes some first rate karate fights. In fact, Bannion's musing about karate, practicing karate, using his karate in fights is actually a large part of the books.

So I guess we'll see if the Burns Bannion books continue to hold the same appeal for me and for now I can hardly wait for the next one. 

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

Review: I Wish, I Wish by Zirk van den Berg

Available in print and ebook from The Cuba Press

I read my first book of 2021, today, 1 January, Zirk van den Berg's I Wish, I Wish. At 182 print pages it's actually a novella so don't be too impressed by my quick start to the year. It's available in English from The Cuba Press in print and the ebook epub and mobi formats. Books in mobi format can be imported into a Kindle.

Seb is a mortician for White Lilly Funerals. He's very good at his job  but his work doesn't make for entertaining 'how was work today' stories. To be honest, outside of work, he's more an observer than a participant in his personal life. He is distant from his teenaged son and daughter and his wife doesn't seem to like him very much.

One day a mother brings in her dying son, Gabe, who is matter-of-fact about wanting to know what will happen when he dies. Though their meeting is short, Seb feels a bond with this extraordinary boy. Though they met only once in life, Gabe has a magical impact on Seb that will eventually lead to new personal bonds and unexpected directions in his life.

I used the word 'magical' above but this is not at all a fantasy. It's more how a chance encounter can spark something is a person's life. The publisher's blurb calls it 'A darkly comic tale with a tender heart'.  I wouldn't emphasize the 'comic' as much, but tender hearted, it most definitely is.

I should warn any very squeamish readers that the author does go into detail about how bodies are prepared by the mortician. For me, this is necessary to give the reader a better sense of Seb as a person and, also, I found pretty interesting.

Zirk was born in Namibia, lived in South Africa, and emigrated to New Zealand with his family. He publishes in English and Afrikaans so I guess readers in both countries have a claim on him. He's an author I enjoy very much and Nobody Dies is still one of my favorite crime novels. If you read books in Afrikaans and crave a good read in that language, Zirk has you covered with six titles including I Wish, I Wish which was first published in Afrikaans as Ek Wens, Ek Wens. I have more of his books I want to do reviews of this year.

Keywords: loss, grieving, death, funerals, morticians