Whipped Cream Difficulties

I generally don’t blog recent book acquisitions. While doing so would probably give me fodder for at least one post every three days or so, most of what I purchase wouldn’t be of interest to other bloggers; I do buy some SF and mystery firsts, but not as many as other people I can name. Most of what I do buy is primarily of interest to me.

That being said, I did pick up a couple of books recently that might tickle the fancy (or the funny bones) of some folks; I’m thinking specifically of Lawrence and Tam here.

Yes, you are reading that correctly: the title of the book is They Were Murdered In France. This is a fairly old (1957) true crime book consisting of 15 vignettes involving British citizens who were….murdered in France. I haven’t started reading it yet (I just got it out of the PO Box) but judging from the jacket copy, it appears that Mr. Harry J. Greenwall did not have a high opinion of the French police, or of Interpol.

A few weeks ago, there was an interesting discussion over at Tam’s place about gun porn in adventure fiction. On the one hand, you have the guy carrying a generic revolver. On the other hand, you have Tam’s Jock Studright example. (Stephen Hunter falls in the “just right” position for me. For example, in Havana, he has Earl carry a Super .38, and there’s a key scene where Earl explains exactly why. But that scene, while lovingly describing the advantages of the Super .38 (known today as the .38 Super), also serves to advance Earl’s characterization; Hunter uses that discussion to show what kind of person Earl is, and how he thinks.)

Anyway, the two most notorious exemplars of the way over the top weapon description school of writing are Jerry Ahern in The Survivalist books (“…two stainless-steel Detonics Combat Master .45s carried in an Alessi double-shoulder rig”) and Don Pendleton in the Mack Bolan/Executioner books (“The AutoMag, however, had a mind of its own. It roared out fire and massive disgust, hurling 300 grains of splattering death…”)

The Executioner’s War Book is almost the Platonic ideal of Jock Studright. It isn’t a book in the “Executioner” series, per se: rather, it consists of a biographical sketch of Pendelton, fan letters from readers, notable excerpts from the previous books (“notable” in the sense of either giving insight into Bolan’s character, or involving particularly bloody Mafia deaths, or both), a summary of the series to that point…

…and pretty much right in the middle, a catalog of Bolan’s weapons and equipment, including lovely line drawings of such things as his “War Wagon” and the scope-sighted Marlin 444 lever action, a paen to the AutoMag, exploded drawings of the M2 and the Uzi, and so on. This works out to about 45 pages of weapons porn in a 201 page book. I’ve never been a huge Bolan fan, but this was just so weird I had to pick it up.