My New Year Challenge

As 2020 comes to end I find myself thinking about the books I've read over the last twelve months and the books I'd like to read next year. There are so many good books I would love to be able to experience. But I always end up telling myself - the best thing to do is simply choose the ones you know you will have a more than better chance of liking. Life's too short to plough diligently through something you hate (although I've broken that personal rule a few times to be completely honest).

Therefore, in 2021, I've set myself a New Year's Challenge. Over the course of the year I will be reading a series of books across four well-known genre 'universes'. But to ensure I have a pretty good chance of getting through them all, I have picked from series that I know I'm going to like - at least from personal experience in the past that is. As you clearly can see from this post's main picture I have selected from Star Wars, Star Trek, James Bond and Musashi.

All of the books are currently available in eBook format. I haven't read any of them before but they have been on my radar for a while. I tried to keep the books within the 20th Century, but had to make a few exceptions. I don't want the challenge to disrupt my blogging completely so I am restricting the challenge to a total of 19 books. Seeing as I get through roughly 50 per year, I believe this will still allow me the time to dip in and out of the challenge and still keep Digital Bibliophilia a location for a varied review site of genre fiction.

Breakout

Author: Oliver Jacks (aka Kenneth Royce)
Publisher: Grafton Books

Date: 1986

Pages: 254

Not currently available in eBook format

In one of those happy coincidences, I was attracted to a previously unknown author's book by its cover artwork, only to find out out it was actually a pen name used by an established and well-known writer.

Breakout is a thriller published in 1986 in the UK by Grafton Books. The author is Oliver Jacks, who I'd not had any previous experience of reading. Some light internet research didn't surface much of a backlog. A few other thriller/action adventure tales in the 70's and 80's but nothing outstanding or particularly well-known. It seemed that Mr Jacks penned another four books (Man on a Short Leash, Assassination Day and Autumn Heroes) but had disappeared by the nineties. Jacks doesn't have much of a presence on the internet and doesn't even have a page dedicated to him on Fantastic Fiction.

However, after finishing the story, I persevered in my studies and started to notice something. Along with Jacks name I noticed a listing that coupled one of his books with the name Kenneth Royce. This rang a bell and a quick reference back to the Appendix of Mike Ripley's excellent Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang confirmed that indeed Oliver Jacks was a name used by thriller writer Kenneth Royce. It seemed I had inadvertently landed the final Jacks book in his quartet of standalone tales.

Royce was born in 1920 in Croydon, UK. He served in the British Armed Forces during the Second World War, raising to the rank of Captain. After the war he became involved in running a travel agency which afforded him the perfect position to conduct research on the background to his many books. It was with the Spider Scott series that he rose to fame. Spider is an ex-burglar who can't quite give up the temptations of crime and who is recruited to work for the secret services. Scott became known as the XYY Man due to his extra 'Y' chromosome giving him a pre-disposition towards criminality.

The Memoirs of Solar Pons

Author: August Derleth
First Published: 1951
File size/Pages: 1373KB / 251pp
Ebook Publisher: Belanger Books

Ebook Date: Jun 2018

Despite what may have been published in the 1970's, the second collection of cases for Solar Pons was actually The Memoirs of Solar Pons. So in keeping with the republished and reformatted ebooks by Belanger Books I am following their sequence and downloaded the next chronological installement of the adventures of the most famous of Sherlock Holmes successors.

Memoirs sees author August Derleth in fine form. He weaves Holmesian influences, references and homage into his second book about Solar Pons, the private detective who uses prodigious powers of observation and deduction to solve crimes in 1920's and 1930's London, from his base in an apartment at 7B Praed Street. There is even a reference to that other man of exceptional detecting talent, Dr. John Thorndyke (I'd recommend grabbing a copy of the The Red Thumb Mark or The Eye of Osiris if you can). Derleth cleverly manages to squeak in a sneaky appearance of Lovecraftian literature, which adds a bit of spice to one of the tales (see below).

There are eleven stores, one less than in Regarding Sherlock Holmes - however, these are in my opinion far superior in structure and in the telling. Derleth is able to weave more variety and greater story-building into Memoirs than he did before. The stakes are higher, the need to deduct more quickly is evident, and the supporting characters are more finely drawn. It's clear that the author had improved in his wirting skills at this time. Despite my miss-givings with the first book, this one starts well and, with only a few exceptions, holds its interest throughout. A number of the tales are longer in form, allowing for more interaction between Pons, his assistant Dr Lyndon Parker, suspects, and Police Detective Jamison.

Pons' relationship with Parker begins to take a different slant over Holmes and Watson in this collection I feel. Whereas Holmes elicits some comradeship and even a little brotherly love towards Dr Watson - Dr Parker doesn't appear to receive the same treatment from his exceptionally talented partner. There is a more critical vein running through Soalr Pons. He is only too quick to put Parker down, and seems to relish it more than Holmes ever did with Watson (or perhaps I'm more familiar with the later and have a tendancy to over romanticize it?).

Hard Target - The Zone #1

Author: James Rouch

Ebook Publisher:  Speaking Volumes
Ebook Date: Jul. 2012

File size/Pages: 513KB / 158pp

First Published: New English Library, 1980

"For two years The Zone has been alive with death, ravaged by war beyond sanity, raped with fire and poison."

So goes the blurb on the back of Hard Target: The Zone #1 by James Rouch. An alternative timeline novel where the fall of the Berlin Wall never happened and a Third World War has developed between NATO and the Soviet Union. 

There isn't a lot of information available about the author. His is (was?) British, lives in the west of England. The Zone series and three other war fiction novels appear to be his only books to date. He became a literary agent and had his own company website at one time, but that no longer exists and I can't find anything else.

Written in 1980 at the height of the late era Cold War when President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher - best of chums across the Atlantic - were battling tooth and nail with Leonid Brezhnev, the Russian leader. The 'Ruskies' had invaded Afghanistan in 1979. There was even a videogame issued by Atari called 'Missile Command' in which you could play at thermonuclear war. Nuclear warfare was just the twitch of a finger on a big red button away from reality.

Playing on this atmosphere, Rouch's series of books, running up to ten installments by 1990 I believe, pit the combined NATO forces of a group of American and British soldiers together into numerous missions in the ravaged wasteland now called The Zone. 

Hard Target takes place two years after the outbreak of WWIII. There isn't any supporting history to explain the current fictional political situation, or the evolution of the contaminated land that most of the action takes place in. Rouch relies upon segments of the book that take the form of reports to HQ, or messages to the Team, to give a little back-story. However, he does cheekily recommend that the reader might want to locate some reference sources such as, "Pawns of Politics; A study of the refugee problem inside The Zone."

Marksman and Other Stories

Author: William Campbell Gault
Publisher:  Crippen & Landru
Date: Mar. 2003
Pages: 206

Not currently available in eBook format or paperback

Marksman contains a loving end-piece by Shelly Gault, daughter of William Campbell Gault. In it, she reminisces about how her father would proudly claim that from the moment he began writing up until the early 1980's, he had sold everything he had ever written.

It's no surprise. Gault could write exceptionally well, and was quick to spot opportunities. When he saw dwindling sales of mystery fiction in the 1960's he turned his attention to writing juvenile fiction exclusively and began a long and successful period of his career. As she adds he "loved it when he heard that his titles were among the most stolen from libraries"!

Crippen & Landru have been publishing a series of books in their The Lost Classics Series since 2002. These consist of uncollected stories by great mystery and detective writers of the past. Most are published in hardback, but if you look carefully you can find some in eBook format. This particular issue is currently not available in electronic format yet.

This collection of short literature from William Campbell Gault consists of twelve tales published between 1940 and 1957 in magazines such as Clues, S&S Dectective Story Magazine, Mercury Mystery Magazine and premier titles such as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Blackmask and Manhunt (none of which made it into 2019's The Best of Manhunt if you are wondering). The first six are stories unrelated to each other, and cover the period from 1940 to the middle fifties. A few contain detectives, but most of them involve men-about-town who are involved in strange circumstance. The second half of Marksman contains the complete collection of short tales featuring one of Gault's most famous creations, Private Investigator, Joe Puma that appeared in 1956 and 1957.

Rough Trade

Author: Robert Silverberg
Publisher: PS Publishing
Date: Dec. 2017
Pages: 415

Not currently available in eBook format or paperback

In 2012, Hard Case Crime published Robert Silverberg's novelette Blood on the Mink, packaged together with a couple of short stories (Dangerous Doll and One Night of Violence). These stories had been written by Silverberg in the late fifties and early sixties for pulp magazines of the time. The success of the HCC paperback prompted a new interest in the authors crime back catalogue, and so in 2017, British independant publishing house PS Publishing release a limited run of his stories from the same period as Rough Trade.

This new collection contains 23 short stories (but does also include One Night of Violence from the HCC paperback) covering the years from 1957 to 1961. Most of the stories are around ten to twelve pages in length, with a few 10,000 worders increasing that to 30 page tales. All of them appeared in one of two pulp magazines that Silverberg was providing a constant stream of material too, Guilty and Trapped. As he says in one of the introductions that preface each story, for some reason Guilty was the more poular magazine despite it covering exactly the same type of crime/hardboiled/delinquent teenager type of content as its companion magazine. Both magazines were edited by the same man, W.W. Scott, to whom Harlan Ellison introduced Silverberg. Thus was born a period of his life where he supplemented his living by sending rapidly written shorts to Scott for consideration.

Silverberg left college and got married in 1956. He immediately began to write full-time - he had already started writing science fiction whilst in college, and wanted to continue to write for a living. Whilst his partner went to work, there was pressure on him to contribute to their living costs. At this time there were very few publishers issuing regular science fiction magazines, nowhere enough for Silverberg to earn good money. Needing to branch out, he began to write for many of the pulps inclinding submissions of Westerns, Sports and Mens Adventure tales. But crime was still king in the late fifties, and so he eventually began to churn out the sort of stories that he hoped would appear in Manhunt.