→ September 9, 2011
→ By

The Score.

Littlefield leaned closer to him. “You’re a young man, you can still learn. Pay attention to this. You can steal in this country, you can rape and murder, you can bribe public officials, you can pollute the morals of the young, you can burn your place of business down for the insurance money, you can do almost anything you want, and if you act with just a little caution and common sense you’ll never even be indicted. But if you don’t pay your income tax, Grofield, you will go to jail.”

Donald Westlake, writing under the pseudonym Richard Stark, produced a series of hard-boiled crime novels starring the thief known as Parker, a series that began with the book The Hunter (later adapted for the screen as Point Blank and Payback). The University of Chicago Press has reprinted the first twenty Parker novels (out of 24), including The Score, which is currently available as a free eBook through amazon and is also free on BN.com, with the promotion running through the end of September.

The crime at the heart of The Score is certainly ambitious – Parker finds himself drafted to join a group that intends to knock over an entire town in North Dakota, led by the unreliable Edgars, who devised the plan because he knows the town’s layout and when they could maximize their payout. Stark spends about two thirds of the novel on the setup, with Parker leading the effort to assemble the ideal team and handling some of the logistics, including an interesting scene where he goes to purchase weapons from a blind arms dealer who stores the goods in boxes for children’s toys. The bickering starts from the moment Parker, who has little to no tolerance for bullshit, meets Edgars, and while it never explodes into a complete meltdown, the undercurrent is always there and threatens to undermine the solidarity of the team in an effort where one screw-up will sink the entire operation.

The real appeal of the novel is in the interplay between the characters, mostly between Parker and the others. Parker’s experience and limited tolerance for frivolity makes him the ideal field general for the operation, but he’s also forced to delegate as the group takes over the town almost building by building. Three group members eventually deviate from the plan in one way or another, forcing Parker to adapt on the fly, and his reaction to one of those three was one of the few big surprises in the book. But Westlake’s knack for clipped, quick dialogue keeps everything moving even through that first two-thirds of the novel where nothing actually happens beyond the planning; even the masters in the hard-boiled field, Hammett and Chandler, would typically drop a body or two and have their protagonist get a blackjack to the dome before the halfway point, although both had the brighter, more literary prose that they could have dispensed with those plot devices and still kept me riveted.

I am enough of a fan of heist stories that I knocked out The Score inside of forty-eight hours, and appreciated reading one that’s the antithesis of the overly stylized heist motif popularized by Ocean’s Eleven. I could have done with a little more explanation of the big twist from the mouth of the character responsible, although Stark does provide the basic back story, and Parker’s sudden decision to go soft on one of his partners in the heist, although not terribly consequential, felt oddly out of character. Parker’s simple, direct, no-nonsense approach is the real appeal of the novel for me, even with those quirks, a rare example of a likeable protagonist who’s actually the bad guy.

Next up: Michael Ruhlman’s The Soul of a Chef: The Journey Toward Perfection. Ruhlman’s Ratio remains an essential, often-used item on my cookbook shelf. (Shelves, really. Three so far.)

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→ November 3, 2010
→ By

Mint Condition.

UPDATE: Folks, the line about Old Hoss Radbourn being my alter ego is a joke. I’m not Hoss, but he and I have had some fun with the rumor that I am. He’s incredibly clever and I’m flattered to be thought the source, but it’s not me.

—

I received a comp copy of Dave Jamieson’s Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession back in the spring through my connection with the guys at mental floss, but got backed up in my reading between the move and writing playoff previews that I just got around to the book now. If you’ve got any history of collecting baseball cards (I do) or an interest in that tangential part of baseball history, I highly recommend the book, a quick, fun, occasionally funny run through the history of the baseball card, one that disabused me of a handful of card myths I thought were true.

Jamieson, who must be roughly my age as he too collected a hoard of cards that are no longer worth the cardboard they’re printed on, goes back to the origins of the baseball card as a way to sell tobacco, allegedly to adults but, hey, if a few kids caught the leaf habit, so much the better. Many of those tobacco cards are, of course, major collectors’ items today, but what I didn’t realize is that they’re rare not just because they weren’t kept but because they varied so widely – manufacturers would issue many different cards per player, with different brands advertised on the backs or different portraits on the fronts, for example. Jamieson discusses the history and myth behind the T206 Honus Wagner card, but also points out that it’s not the rarest card in history (another card in the same set, the T206 “Slow” Joe Doyle error card, is definitely rarer). Instead, Jamieson posits, the Wagner card became more valuable because it was deemed valuable in the first place: The media attention paid to the card when it sold for record-breaking sums made it more desirable to other, status-seeking collectors down the road.

He jumps forward a bit to the period after World War II when the card industry really boomed with the introduction of Bowman and Topps cards, as well as the latter’s monopolization of the industry that lasted until Fleer won an antitrust lawsuit in 1981. Topps’ actions to create and defend a monopoly occurred at the same time that the MLB Players’ Association was getting started, and while at first the MLBPA was willing to let Topps have its run of the joint, Marvin Miller’s first order of business was to end Topps’ free ride and begin returning that lost value to the players – making the union, which was battling one monopoly in MLB management, a willing partner to another monopoly in the baseball card realm. From there, Jamieson chronicles the rise and fall of the collectors’ boom in baseball cards, drawing much of his material from Pete Williams’ 1995 book Card Sharks, on the formation of Upper Deck and the creative destruction it brought to the baseball card industry, a very good story in its own right.

Jamieson keeps the book from turning into dry history by, naturally, finding and discussing a few notable eccentrics along the way. I particularly enjoyed the section on Woody Gelman, longtime head of Topps’ Product Development team and the creator of, among other icons, Bazooka Joe and the Mars Attacks! series. (I remember seeing Topps’ Wacky Packages as a kid, possibly the first time I ever ran into (or understood) parody in any form, but I don’t think I realized until I read this book that they were a Topps product.) Jamieson also takes us inside the collection of a former owner of that T206 Wagner, and looks at the rise of both card auction outfits, card authentication services, and the “ethical” card doctor who doctors worthless cards to better understand how fraudsters do it to create valuable ones. And I’d be remiss if I omitted the part my alter ego friend Old Hoss Radbourn played in the book, with a quietly extended middle finger in a few early cards of himself. That’s right: Old Hoss may have invented photobombing.

The book ends with a lament on the slow death of baseball cards, a phenomenon for which Jamieson explores various causes but can’t pinpoint a single reason for boys’ lack of interest in something so innate to his (and my) childhood. (I will offer that steroids have jack squat to do with it, since interest in MLB and minor league baseball grew substantially during the “steroid era.”) I do agree with his point that cheapening the core product by adding “chase cards” – prizes, limited edition cards, or other package inserts that weren’t just plain old cards of everyday players – didn’t help, but I think the fact that the cards themselves lack any interactivity is a huge part of why they’ve fallen so far out of favor. If you’re a kid today, what are you going to do with a pack of baseball cards? There’s no game or challenge involved, and I’d be hard-pressed to explain to an 8-year-old boy why I thought baseball cards were fun. They just were. The cards haven’t really changed, but maybe the definition of fun has.

At about 240 pages, Mint Condition is a very quick read, well under four hours for me, but in that short space it managed to fill a gap in my knowledge of baseball history, one I doubt I would have explored on my own since I left my baseball card affinity back the 1980s. Aside from the unsatisfying conclusion and some need for a better copyeditor, it’s well worth your time.

Next up: I’m crawling through the desert of Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt.

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→ April 3, 2010
→ By

Tales of the South Pacific.

My 2010 Predictions post is up, including standings, playoffs, MVPhe/Cy winners, and a top 3 for each RoY award. There’s also a straggler post from Arizona on Fabio Martinez and two other Angel prospects, and I did a chat on Friday afternoon.

I’m scheduled to be on the Herd on Monday morning, but the weekly ESPNEWS hit is off next week.

—

James Michener won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for fiction with his short story collection Tales of the South Pacific, later adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein into a Pulitzer- and Tony-award-winning musical, which later became a hit movie*. The stories in the collection are connected, so while there’s no single narrative through the series (aside from World War II itself, a fairly compelling plot even sixty-plus years later), characters appear in multiple stories and you couldn’t read them out of sequence without missing some history or the occasional inside reference. They’re interesting, often funny, frequently romantic (in the classical sense, not in the Harlequin sense), but nothing Michener wrote could compete with his concise recap of the assault on the (fictional) island of Kuralei and the brief story that follows it, as the narrator walks through the cemetery that holds the fallen from that battle.

*I actually had no idea that “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair” was from South Pacific until I sat down to write this post. I figured it wasn’t originally from that hair-coloring commercial, but I couldn’t have even guessed what musical contained the track.

Some scattered thoughts from this book:

* This had to be an inspiration for Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 in multiple ways. I could imagine Heller writing his novel as a sarcastic, almost angry response to Michener’s somewhat antiseptic take on a brutal war – but at the same time, Michener mined subtle humor from incompetent officers, and the character Tony, who flies all over the Pacific trading one good for another in pursuit of liquor, seems like a precursor to Heller’s Milo.

* Tales of the South Pacific would never win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction today. The first 30-odd years of the award largely rewarded novels told stories highly illustrative of some aspect of the American experience. If you look at recent winners, particularly the last ten years, the emphasis has been on edgier fare – Oscar Wao, Middlesex, The Road, even the blacks-who-owned-slaves backdrop of The Known World – with the occasional exception for an old-school winner like Empire Falls (which handled several major and very modern themes) or Gilead (I imagine the gorgeous prose and raw emotion won out). Michener’s novel today is almost more like a smart beach read, enjoyable, set in a serious time, but not a novel for the ages.

* The mere title of this novel reminds me of the best musical that never existed, found in an episode of the TV series Amazing Stories called “Gershwin’s Trunk,” in which a songwriter with writer’s block uses a psychic to contact the ghost of George Gershwin, who provides him with (among others) a song called “I Discovered You,” leading with the couplet: “Balboa thought it was terrific/When he discovered the Pacific.” Twenty-five years I have had that song in the back of my brain. It’s a hell of an episode.

Next up: A book written by a reader! Richard Dansky’s first novel, the ghost story Firefly Rain, which is excellent through the first 100 pages.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,