52 Pick-up - Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard has long been a standby author of mine—someone whose work I would pick up at random whenever I wasn’t reading anything in particular. For whatever reason, I hadn’t read a book by him in several years, so when I found a copy of 52 Pick-Up in a Little Free Library I grabbed it eagerly.

52 Pick-Up is classic Elmore Leonard, full of skeezy characters, excellent naturalistic dialogue, and crisp, effortless prose. Leonard never feels like he’s trying to impress, and thus always impresses. As far as the plot goes, I wouldn’t rank this among his best, but it’s certainly engaging. Harry Mitchell, a former soldier and autoworker who studied engineering and opened a successful auto plant, is captured by masked assailants and shown a porn film starring him and his mistress. They demand he pay up or they’ll leak the footage. Stubborn Harry refuses, and the ante is steadily upped, resulting in murder, kidnapping, and other Leonardy mayhem.

The characters are archetypal but distinct, filled with life through Leonard’s keen eye for detail and even keener ear for capturing spoken language. He has mastered the art of dropping words form sentences in a way that mirrors speech, something I see surprisingly rarely in other books (perhaps because it sounds hackneyed if done wrong)

I wouldn’t call 52 Pick-Up my favourite of Leonard’s novels (that’s Freaky Deaky, incidentally), and the title is incredibly arbitrary (referring, I assume, to the $52,000 in bribe money the perps settle on, a number I’m guessing he chose after he thought of the title), but it’s solid and worth reading.

Shardik - Richard Adams

A copy of Shardik has sat on my bookshelf for over fifteen years. I bought it as a teenager, fresh off the heels of reading the incomparable Watership Down and further intrigued by the character’s name check in the third Dar Tower book, The Waste Lands. I know I started it shortly after I bought it, but for whatever reason I put it down after fifty r so pages and didn’t pick it up again until a few weeks ago. I can understand why, as it is a long book written in a rich, almost antiquated style, and the plot simmers for quite awhile before flaming up into action. I’d read more challenging books by then, though, so perhaps it caught me when I was craving a breezier read. In any case, it sat unread on my shelf all this time, following me between houses and cities, always earning a place among my other books.

But now I’ve read it, and I can safely say I was missing out. Shardik is a fantastic book, densely woven with complex characters and a world envisioned in such detail that it almost seems real. it is the worldbuilding that aligns it with Watership Down, that and the fundamental optimism of its author, which survives the horrors enacted in both books only to emerge unscathed at the end of each. Otherwise, they are very different novels—so much so that I can’t help but admire the bravery (or thickheadedness) of Adams following up a highly successful children’s book about rabbits with a dense religious parable about the evils of slavery and the unfathomable nature of the divine.

The hero, a simple hunter named Kelderek, is greyer than his leporine counterparts in Watership. He starts out with a simple nobility that reminds me of Fiver, but Adams allows for his corruption when given the sacred role of envoy to Shardik, the bear god long worshipped on his home island of Ortelga but unseen for generations, until the chance arrival of an enormous bear driven ashore by a forest fire. Shardik has a rich cast, but Kelderek is its core, and Adams makes the bold choice of making him compromised by his decisions, breaking him down in the third act in a saintly scouring that allows him to reemerge, literally and figuratively cleansed.

Adams’ writing remains superb, deftly outlining the geography, history, and politics of the Bekla and the surrounding regions. His prose is strong, though in this book he has a tendency to use extended similes, in which a scenario is depicted in great detail—sometimes for whole paragraphs—then compared to the current action. As a device, it harkens back to classical texts, and gives the writing an air of antiquity, but there are periods where it feels somewhat repetitive, being employed over and over again in quick succession.

This is a small matter, though, and doesn’t detract form the book’s overall power. It deserves to be ranked among the great 20th century novels.

Helter Skelter - Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry

Charles Manson needs no introduction, nor do the crimes he ordered from his cult. In broad strokes at least, these are pretty universally known. Helter Skelter gives a greater (and lurid) level of detail than I’d previously known, but the acts themselves werent’ a revelation. But the book isn’t about the crime so much as the punishment, and the quest therefore, and Buglioisi spends most of the pages outlining how the case against Charles Manson was built (including the many missteps made by the LA Sheriff’s Office along the way) and how the trial proceeded.

There is a lot of time spent on amssing evidence and outlining cross-examinations, but the book is well written enough that such legal arcana is intelligble, and even exciting. Bugliosi does a good job of explaining to a layperson why he made the choices he did in presenting evidence, what parameters limited his ability to share certain facts with the journey, and how the interplay between the judge and the lawyers unfolded.

Despite the focus on the trial, I did learn a lot more than I’d already known about the precise structure of Manson’s cult, and his deeply bizarre belief system, which ultimately became the crux of the case itself. Bugliosi felt that, since Manson did not physically commit the crimes himself, he would need to convince the jury of a motive demented and persuasive enough to goad several followers—most of them women—to undertake acts of startling, savage evil. The book’s title, Helter Shkelter, is thus more than just a catchy term, but really does encapsulate the madness behind the killings—Manson’s twisted belief that he could encite a race war and then (in a jump particularly lacking in self-awareness) lord over the winning Black side post-armageddon.

The writing is brisk and tidy, bereft of flourishes and easy to read. I suspect Bugliosi can portray complex ideas clearl,y given the profession, but whenever a co-writer is pre-faced by “with” and not “and,” I can’t help but suspect that it was them who did the most work putting words to the page (having been in such a situation myself in the past).

For those interested in Manson or in True Crime that favors prosecution over sensationalism, Helter Skelter is worth reading.