Though die-hard fans may find it disappointing to return to these hoary landmarks, Klinger has provided the perfect gift for...
A gargantuan, extensively annotated collection of five cornerstones of American crime fiction that every fan will want to own even if they never read (or reread) them.
The docket includes the first appearances of Charlie Chan (Earl Derr Biggers’ The House Without a Key, 1925), Philo Vance (S.S. Van Dine’s The Benson Murder Case, 1926), and Ellery Queen (Ellery Queen’s The Roman Hat Mystery, 1929) as well as Red Harvest (1929), Dashiell Hammett’s first novel about the Continental Op, and Little Caesar (1929), W.R. Burnett’s memorably filmed account of the rise and fall of Chicago gangster Rico Bandello. Although all five novels are indispensable, most of them are more dated than you remember. Charlie Chan’s appeal, which depends on his self-effacing charm and trademark aphorisms, remains constant from one case to the next, but Van Dine, Queen, and Hammett all published better mysteries within a few years of their first novels, and Burnett’s clipped dialogue (“Some guys are sure careless with the lead,” one of his characters says, mourning another’s passing) reads like a pastiche. Philo Vance, widely perceived as insufferable even at the height of his fame, has grown no more companionable over the years, and the early Ellery Queen runs him a close second. If four of the five selections are memorable mainly as period pieces, Red Harvest still seethes with an unsettling power from its nameless hero’s immersion in a mining town’s labor dispute that along the way produces what must be the only chapter in all fiction titled “The Seventeenth Murder.” Indefatigable editor Klinger (In the Shadow of Agatha Christie, 2018, etc.) provides an incisive foreword, annotations that argue, for example, that the events of The Benson Murder Case took place in 1918 and those of The Roman Hat Mystery in 1923, and variously salient pictures of Anthony van Dyck, Al Capone, and King Kal?kaua of Hawaii.
Though die-hard fans may find it disappointing to return to these hoary landmarks, Klinger has provided the perfect gift for newcomers lucky enough not to have read its contents already—and the perfect excuse to wonder if a 1930s sequel may be lurking around the corner.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-861-7
Page Count: 1152
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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