Eventually, I'm going to read something that's easy to summarize for this blog, but today, I didn't manage it. Fast One, by Paul Cain, is a 1933 hard boiled crime novel about Kells, a criminal who gets framed for murder after refusing to help another denizen of the underworld, Jack Rose, with some trouble on a gambling boat, and has a rather strong reaction to it. After he gets double crossed over and over again, he somehow comes to the conclusion that he needs to be in charge of all of the gangsters in town. Once Kells achieves this, things escalate quickly, and he proceeds to get double crossed for over one hundred more pages.
Fast One really should have been an exciting book. There are gangsters, gambling, political conspiracies, some inexplicable episode in the middle with boxers, and enough dead bodies that I think a sheet of notes would be helpful in keeping track of all of them. For all that goes in the book, though, I was bored during a lot of it. The characters, other than a few that spend the entire novel in the forefront, lack personality and come and go quickly, making it somewhat meaningless when a more important character kills them off. Beyond that, there are so many nonsensical plots both by Kells and engineered against him that at some points, the book stops making sense entirely.
Though I have plenty of complaints about Fast One, it wasn't totally without its merits. Some passages, especially towards the end of the book, were actually quite exciting. It also had the perfect ending, one that was very logical and made it hard to imagine another way that the story could have possibly ended. I just didn't enjoy it as much as I have other, more outlandish pulp novels.
If Fast One sounds like it would be more your cup of tea than it was mine, an eBook of it can be found at Munsey's, which is a super-nifty eBook database for out of copyright novels. There are some bothersome typos in it, but nothing that affects its readability. Most of them are simple capitalization errors or strange bits of punctuation resting where they couldn't possibly belong.
Showing posts with label munseys. Show all posts
Showing posts with label munseys. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Saturday, October 27, 2012
Two Books That I Don't Spend Paragraph After Paragraph Complaining About
Hello! Since my last post here, I've read two books, though the fact that both of them were short makes that fairly unimpressive. As is not the case with most of my posts, however, I actually enjoyed both of them, so I guess that I don't get to complain as much as I usually do tonight.
The first of the two books, which I read on Monday, was Net of Cobwebs by Elisabeth Saxnay Holding. I'd downloaded it on a whim from Munseys.com without reading much about it first, so, from the title, I'd expected it to be some sort of ridiculous horror novel or something like that. Instead, it was a murder mystery where the crimes committed parallel the mental breakdown of a veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. In a lot of pulp novels that I've read, it seems like they're old or cheesy, but that wasn't the case with Net of Cobwebs at all. It was an interesting book where the solution to the mystery wasn't obvious at all, and I liked it so well that, after everyone else had left the teachers' lounge, I sat and read it until my lunch break had ended. It's not a lengthy novel at all, either, so if you enjoy mysteries and are looking for a good free ebook, I would recommend it strongly.
The second of my most recent reads, Jennie Baxter, Journalist, by Robert Barr, is definitely not as good as Net of Cobwebs was. It was, though, at least as entertaining. Although it sounds like a boring and typical woman-with-a-nifty-career novel from the 1890s, and certainly starts like one, too, at some point, things in the novel just go a little loopy. This may bother some readers, but when I start to read a book thinking that it is going to be about the newspaper business and end up reading a book with princesses, mad scientists, and Sherlock Holmes knockoffs, I am not disappointed. At times, it does border on "get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich" sexism, and it has a really idiotic sudden resolution. Jennie Baxter, Journalist was not boring at all, though, and the fact that it ended up being so bizarre and over the top didn't hurt it at all. If you'd like to read it, too, it can be found for free at Project Gutenberg, Amazon.com, and Munsey's. The ebook of it from Amazon does contain a couple of typos, but they're nothing that harms the story as a whole.
The first of the two books, which I read on Monday, was Net of Cobwebs by Elisabeth Saxnay Holding. I'd downloaded it on a whim from Munseys.com without reading much about it first, so, from the title, I'd expected it to be some sort of ridiculous horror novel or something like that. Instead, it was a murder mystery where the crimes committed parallel the mental breakdown of a veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. In a lot of pulp novels that I've read, it seems like they're old or cheesy, but that wasn't the case with Net of Cobwebs at all. It was an interesting book where the solution to the mystery wasn't obvious at all, and I liked it so well that, after everyone else had left the teachers' lounge, I sat and read it until my lunch break had ended. It's not a lengthy novel at all, either, so if you enjoy mysteries and are looking for a good free ebook, I would recommend it strongly.
The second of my most recent reads, Jennie Baxter, Journalist, by Robert Barr, is definitely not as good as Net of Cobwebs was. It was, though, at least as entertaining. Although it sounds like a boring and typical woman-with-a-nifty-career novel from the 1890s, and certainly starts like one, too, at some point, things in the novel just go a little loopy. This may bother some readers, but when I start to read a book thinking that it is going to be about the newspaper business and end up reading a book with princesses, mad scientists, and Sherlock Holmes knockoffs, I am not disappointed. At times, it does border on "get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich" sexism, and it has a really idiotic sudden resolution. Jennie Baxter, Journalist was not boring at all, though, and the fact that it ended up being so bizarre and over the top didn't hurt it at all. If you'd like to read it, too, it can be found for free at Project Gutenberg, Amazon.com, and Munsey's. The ebook of it from Amazon does contain a couple of typos, but they're nothing that harms the story as a whole.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Rubbish Sci-Fi and Spiffy Pulp Novels
Hello! It's been a bit since I last posted here, so I have read multiple books since the time of my last entry. Because there are several books to talk about, I don't have a fancy picture of a book cover to put up, for which I apologize. Hopefully, however, the tale of my treks through free book lists shall prove sufficient entertainment for all of you who have somehow stumbled across this blog.
Plenzes, by Chris Lang, wasn't the first thing that I read since my last post, but since it isn't a pulp novel, it gets its own special paragraph. I would very much like to be nice when talking about this sci-fi short story, which I found for free on Kindle through http://www.ereaderiq.com/, but it is difficult. The author did have a lot of interesting and well-thought out ideas about the future of social networking, and they didn't seem as far-fetched or terrifying as they probably should have. However, his main character was an unlikable and abusive jerk, the twist at the end came out of nowhere, and the whole thing was plagued with typos. I don't think that I would have gotten through the story had it been a full length novel.
The other two books that I read, The Big Sin by Jack Webb (which was also obtained as a free Kindle book from Amazon) and The Corpse That Walked by Octavius Roy Cohen (from http://www.munseys.com/), were much more entertaining. Admittedly, I really enjoy reading old pulp novels, especially if they seem to think logic and reality are bothers while telling a story, so I'll probably post quite a bit about them in the future. I have read some of them that are so idiotic that even I can't stand them, though, and luckily, neither of these novels falls under that category.
I have to say that of the two books, The Big Sin is undoubtedly the better novel. It's more realistic, more thoughtful, has more likable characters, and is bereft of any major plot holes. It was a quick read that never got boring for a page, and it would be easy to recommend to anyone who really wants to read a book from the 1950s about a priest and a Jewish cop solving the murder of a Mexican showgirl. The Corpse That Walked, however, is about a nice, honest, and not all that smart guy who gets plastic surgery so he can pretend to be a wanted criminal while people are trying to kill him and his intrepid go-getter girlfriend poses as a reporter to uncover the sordid truth behind his exploits. It is ridiculous, over-the-top, and never even tries to be plausible, so, naturally, it was much more entertaining than the more serious novel that took the time to think about religion, prejudice, and justice. The beginning of The Corpse That Walked is painfully slow, particularly if you're reading it a chapter at a time at 1 in the morning, but once it picks up at about the halfway point, its hard to argue against the borderline insanity of the plot being, at the very least, interesting.
Yesterday, I started reading 813 by Maurice Leblanc, so that will at least be included in an upcoming post. Until then, however, I'm hoping to at least keep this blog surviving!
Plenzes, by Chris Lang, wasn't the first thing that I read since my last post, but since it isn't a pulp novel, it gets its own special paragraph. I would very much like to be nice when talking about this sci-fi short story, which I found for free on Kindle through http://www.ereaderiq.com/, but it is difficult. The author did have a lot of interesting and well-thought out ideas about the future of social networking, and they didn't seem as far-fetched or terrifying as they probably should have. However, his main character was an unlikable and abusive jerk, the twist at the end came out of nowhere, and the whole thing was plagued with typos. I don't think that I would have gotten through the story had it been a full length novel.
The other two books that I read, The Big Sin by Jack Webb (which was also obtained as a free Kindle book from Amazon) and The Corpse That Walked by Octavius Roy Cohen (from http://www.munseys.com/), were much more entertaining. Admittedly, I really enjoy reading old pulp novels, especially if they seem to think logic and reality are bothers while telling a story, so I'll probably post quite a bit about them in the future. I have read some of them that are so idiotic that even I can't stand them, though, and luckily, neither of these novels falls under that category.
I have to say that of the two books, The Big Sin is undoubtedly the better novel. It's more realistic, more thoughtful, has more likable characters, and is bereft of any major plot holes. It was a quick read that never got boring for a page, and it would be easy to recommend to anyone who really wants to read a book from the 1950s about a priest and a Jewish cop solving the murder of a Mexican showgirl. The Corpse That Walked, however, is about a nice, honest, and not all that smart guy who gets plastic surgery so he can pretend to be a wanted criminal while people are trying to kill him and his intrepid go-getter girlfriend poses as a reporter to uncover the sordid truth behind his exploits. It is ridiculous, over-the-top, and never even tries to be plausible, so, naturally, it was much more entertaining than the more serious novel that took the time to think about religion, prejudice, and justice. The beginning of The Corpse That Walked is painfully slow, particularly if you're reading it a chapter at a time at 1 in the morning, but once it picks up at about the halfway point, its hard to argue against the borderline insanity of the plot being, at the very least, interesting.
Yesterday, I started reading 813 by Maurice Leblanc, so that will at least be included in an upcoming post. Until then, however, I'm hoping to at least keep this blog surviving!
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