Book review: The Name of the Game is Death by Dan J Marlowe

This ruled. I knew I had to pick it up when I saw it get praised in the back pages of an issue of Ed Burbaker and Sean Philip's comic book Criminal.

The Name of the Game is Death starts off with a brute force Arizona bank robbery like something out of Hell or High Water and doesn't let up as the story rolls east to the swamps of Florida. The protagonist is smart, methodical, mean as hell and the story doesn't cut him any slack as he hunts down the money from the bank robbery gone bad.

I feel like with successful noir there's often a civic angle that gets overlooked. With Chandler and Hammett, it's often in the form a certain fallenness. We have protagonists who are men of ideals in a world that's given up on such things, gone corrupt. That's sometimes present in in Jim Thompson's books, but there's also an angle of alienation. Protagonists who live apart from any sort of community, in a world that's completely indifferent and/or outright hostile to their existence. Strangely I think it's the indifference that hits harder. When it's done right––and it hits hard in the first half of The Name of the Game is Death––it creates a powerful sense of loneliness. 

I really think Marlowe got this, because the protagonist here briefly does find a community. It's small and consists of himself, a love interest, a friend, a dog and a place to drink but what more does a person need? But his need for revenge against the people who killed his partner and stole the score drives him to sabotage any chance he has for a normal life.

The book is hardboiled pulp at its best. It's short and the action doesn't let up. After the cliffhanger ending I look forward to reading the sequel, One Endless Hour, if not the entire series. In true pulp fashion the author wrote ten books but by the third book he changed the protagonist Drake from a cop-hating psychopathic tree surgeon/bank robber into a secret agent. 

Details

Title: The Name of the Game is Death

Author: Dan J Marloe

Series: The Man with Nobody's Face

Format: ebook

Length: 320 pages 

Date: published January 1962

Publisher: Smashwords Edition

Book review: The Greeks: Lost Civilizations by Philip Matyszak

The Greeks: Lost Civilizations was a letdown. 

I wanted to read more on, like, the interactions between Greeks and non-Greeks in all those new cities. There was that intriguing tidbit about the Seleucids giving tax breaks to cities with large Greek populations because the Greeks were great tradesmen, traders and mercenaries. Instead what we get is a lot of narrative about the succession

dans lequel je passe en revue des bandes dessinées

I love wasting a Saturday afternoon reading comic books. Lately I've been getting into reading bandes dessinées. It's so fucking embarrassing, like being a weeaboo for Belgium. Anyway, these are the ones I've read:

Le Chemin du Couchant / The Sunset Trail 

by Tisselli & Corteggiani

There was a time I'd've been really interested in something like this, historical fiction set in Canada from an outsider's perspective.

Ultimately though, I found it

Book review: The Expert System's Brother by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Is there a name for the kind of science fiction that's all about coming up with novel ecosystems and trying to figure out how they work and how humans can adapt to them? Because I think it's my favourite kind.

In The Expert System’s Brother by Adrian Tchaikovsky we have a human civilization taking root in an alien world, literally. The humans base their villages around massive trees that host a kind of combined

A Tedious Joke

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The beginning of the long dash indicates exactly eleven o'clock, mountain daylight saving time.
Dash dash dash dash... dash. 

Book review: Slow Horses by Mick Herron

Wanted more spy fiction after watching The Bureau, and was lucky to find Mick Herron’s Slow Horses. I think this was on my radar after seeing it recommended in Warren Ellis’ newsletter, both of which––the comic book writer and his weekly newsletter––were recently cancelled.

I think the thing about spy fiction is you can’t just have straight up heroes. You need a twist to make the heroes sympathetic, because god knows what they’re doing for queen and country isn’t. The Bureau has Malotru betray his country, The Americans and Deutschland 83 feature spy protagonists working for what audiences have been conditioned to think of as ‘the bad guys’, even the first James

The Bureau and spy fiction

I’ve been watching The Bureau, a French spy thriller that takes a sort of Mad Men approach to the genre. 

The main storyline follows anti-hero spy Guillaume Debailly, codename "Malotru" (Mathieu Kassovitz, director of La Haine), who self-destructs after returning home to Paris by contacting a former lover from his time undercover in Damascus. A secondary storyline follows Marina Loiseau, codename "Phénomène" (Sara Giraudeau), a deep-cover operative. I can’t help but think of Loiseau as a Peggy Olson type, but whereas Elizabeth Moss’ Olson was a genuinely naïve woman growing cynical as she acclimated to life in a man’s world, with Loiseau the naïvety is almost always an act, a ploy to further penetrate the world of Iranian seismology or Israeli spy recruitment. Tertiary storylines usually explore geopolitical hotspots like the Kurds in Rojava or the world of Russian hacking. 

What makes the show so compelling is it’s procedural nature. We go deep into the actual work of spycraft. More le Carré than James Bond, we get a world full of meetings, conference calls, maps and charts. And yet somehow the tension has a way of ramping up higher than most Bond films ever reach.