Category Archives: Lilypad-Library

Books, blurbs, and bullrushes

R.I.P. Warren Murphy

The PolyBlog
January 21 2016

Warren Murphy is and will always be my favourite author.

I was looking for one of his books in e-form today, and just reading through the description of a book I hadn’t seen before, I came across a small phrase that struck me cold — “Warren Murphy passed away in September 2015”. I missed the news entirely. Heck, I heard from him on FB sometime early last year I think, certainly less than a year before his death.

That makes it almost sound like I knew him. I didn’t. I just knew his books.

The first ones I read were the Destroyer novels. My father used to read The Executioner series, Mack Bolans, etc., Nick Carter. So I read them too. And in some pile of similar books at a used store, I came across a pulp-style novel about a killer named Remo. An expert in the art of assassination, courtesy of the House of Sinanju, the basis for all martial arts. It was a glorious premise — the cop who gets framed for a murder, goes to death row, dies (almost), and is resurrected and trained by a small organization that only reports to the President in an oblique way, designed to take on the forces that would destroy the country and who operate outside the law so far that the law has no chance of stopping them. The most lethal of all lethal weapons who could terminate with extreme prejudice.

But the pulp format belied something deeper — the books were fun. The banter back and forth between the student Remo and the trainer Chiun was rapid, insulting, brutal — and hilarious. I loved it.

Murphy wrote them with Richard Ben Sapir and I started collecting books by both of them, including the Destroyer series. Eventually, I found one of Murphy’s Trace novels. It was like striking gold. To be honest, I didn’t find Trace first. I found Digger. If that sounds confusing, it should…they are two series by Warren Murphy with different publishers. Both contain:

  • a lush of an investigator who wears a wire for all his important conversations;
  • insurance investigations for a big company that keeps him employed because one of the senior people likes him for a favour he did him once;
  • an Asian girlfriend who frequently shows up at the end of the novels, listens to the tapes and identifies an important clue to help solve the crime; and,
  • an ex-wife and two children that he doesn’t remember the name of and so calls them by generic nicknames.

Digger is Trace; Trace is Digger. But apparently there were issues with the first publisher (for Digger), and Murphy wanted to go higher end with the novels while the publisher was going pulpy. Murphy took the books elsewhere, they were more full novel length, and Trace was born. I still have the email from him where he explained some of the details (I posted about it on a list, said I’d love to find out the real story some day, another person on the list knew him and forwarded it to him, and he responded directly to me). Getting an email in my inbox from WARREN FRICKING MURPHY was like winning the lottery. I responded, and I totally acted like a fanboy. Never heard back again. I’m sure I went in the “loo-loo” pile.

But I was seriously hooked. I read Destroyer books even after Sapir died and Murphy wasn’t writing them anymore. I read all the Trace books. I hunted down Razoni and Jackson and the Digger novels. I read his King Arthur books, and Grandmaster (swords and modern mysteries!). I found out that he had written others under a pseudonym — Dev Stryker — with his then-wife Molly Cochrane, and gobbled those up too. Hard to find, and he wasn’t blazing the ebook road, so paper was the way to go (some hard to find ones I got through inter-library loans). But every once in awhile, I’d go searching and find a new one by him. Like gold, every time.

I even remember going to see the movie Lethal Weapon 2, and loving the banter, etc. For no real reason in particular, I stayed behind so I could read the credits. I partially wanted to see who the writer was to see if there were any books out there — and there it was. Warren Murphy’s name. Of course. No wonder I loved the writing. It was him.

I didn’t know for a long time that he wasn’t a secret. That he had two Edgars and two Shamus awards. That he’d been a president of MWA. That he was a screenwriter with multiple hits to his credit. That he was actually quite famous.

He was just the writer of the most fun books I had ever read. It was Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries for grown ups, and without the noir or the cozy or the modern forensics focus. Sure, I moved on. I read about V.I. Warshawski. I met Stephanie Plum. I devoured Kinsey Milhone. I fell in love with Susan the guidance counsellor that Spenser loved, and that Hawk seemed to have a warm place in his heart for too. The gumshoes, the sleuths, the professional detectives.

And it is what made me want to be a writer. For the first time, I saw a genre that I loved. Not kids mysteries, not series like Rick Brant or Tom Swift. Not sci-fi. True mysteries. Series that built a genre. Not an Agatha Christie-like sleuth, not a Sherlock Holmes. A plodder. Who got the right answer by hook or by crook, and by plain straight stick-to-it-iveness. My writing may never see the light of publication but if it ever does, if I ever get to introduce my protagonist, you can damn well bet that the dedication will be to Warren Murphy.

My library took a hit today. Five months after his death at age 81, but still a hit. I’ll miss his stories…

Finally setting up my book reviews

The PolyBlog
January 12 2016

I have struggled over the past 15 years with multiple incarnations of my book reviews online. These aren’t your typical amateur string of consciousness reviews, I am far too anal for that. I don’t know how many times I’ve read a review by someone else on a site like Amazon and when I was finished the review, I thought, “What the heck does any of that have to do with the book? Was it good?”.

Some of the worst ones say “five stars, just ordered it, haven’t read it yet”. Or “I’m giving it one star because my aunt Bernice said she heard from a friend that their Minister was told by a parishioner that it has a bad word in it somewhere”. While reviews of those types are easy to dismiss, I am equally troubled by the people who do plot summaries with no review, say only what they like and yet give it 1 or 2 stars, say only what they hate and yet give it 4 or 5 stars, and a host of other equally useless content like “good book”.

And I confess that I have a small dream. Not huge, because I don’t have the time for huge, but small. It is to have people send me their books as advance reader copies (ARCs) because they have read my reviews somewhere else and now want me to review THEM. This isn’t that far-fetched, it has happened multiple times already. I particularly like it when someone reads my review and comments on it. It’s like creating my own time-shifting book club for introverts.

The problem, of course, is if I want to build any sort of brand, I have to actually figure out what that brand is going to be. And I think I’m close. Certainly closer to final than I have ever been before. I have a layout — a link to the book’s cover on Amazon, brief summary of plot or premise, what I liked, what I didn’t like, an overall one-line/tweet review, some boilerplate info on the book’s publication, my rating of course, and some verbiage to address the mandatory US disclosure requirements i.e. if I received the book in exchange for a review or am friends with the author (yep, I’m in Canada, but I think the disclosure is not a bad idea and wouldn’t be surprised if other countries adopt it too, plus as you’ll see below, some of my reviews get posted on US sites, so easier to include it upfront rather than go back and add it later).

Posting it on my own site has always been relatively easy. Figuring out how to create an index, however, which allows people to see the list of reviews by author, title, rating, year, or review order is not as easily accomplished on a simple WordPress site, particularly if I don’t want a lot of back-end programming and data entry nor front-end delays in rendering. The simplest option on both ends is to maintain the various lists as separate static pages that I just update from time to time. I found some nice buttons I like, easily added them, with some bright colour coding, and it’s good to go (Book Review Index). I even managed to include my full approach to book reviews so if anyone wants to know if they want to risk me reading their book and doing a review, they can easily see what I do.

The “building my brand” idea though has frequently overwhelmed my approach as there are lots of places to post reviews, and most of them require the same info for posting, but they all have the info in a slightly different order. I was playing with Microsoft Access to create a simple database for entry and saving of the data, with the idea that I would then generate multiple reports in the format/order that the various review sites needed, but Access was not playing nicely. Part of the problem is that what I’m doing is not really that complicated, and while Access will produce reports out the wazoo, what I really needed was it to produce a single page at a time for the latest single record, and preferably without doing look-up queries to do it. Particularly as there are multiple sites to generate reports for, and I didn’t want to create multiple reports with multiple queries all competing for my attention. I’m sure it can be done. I’m sure it can be made quite simple. But not by me without learning way more about Access than I ever want to learn. There’s something strangely ironic and equally disturbing that I could probably do it in dBase IV or COBOL more easily than I was finding my attempts in Access.

So I switched to Excel. Really, honestly, it’s a flat-file database, and there is no relational element in my usage. Exactly what Excel was originally designed for, albeit I’m using text rather than financial numbers.

My new layout is working AWESOME for me. I have:

  • a primary page which is my master index…it’s not what I work with most of the time, but it does have the complete list — if I lose everything else, this is the master page;
  • Sheet 2 is my simple data entry page — 22 fields, although technically 9 of those get combined into a big tag field later, it’s just easier to group the tags separately when I’m writing the review;
  • Sheet 3 is a temporary paste/staging page — this is a lesson I learned a long time ago to paste into a page that everything else pulls from, rather than pulling from the master or the data entry page…that way if something messes up on the other two pages, or I change some setting or layout, the whole set of subsequent pages are not messed up;
  • Sheets 4-14 are what would have been separate reports in Access but just are “links” to different sections of the staging page and are in the exact order I need to paste my reviews into:
    • my PolyWogg pages;
    • Amazon.ca
    • Amazon.com (they don’t link and push to .ca anymore)
    • Chapters-Indigo
    • Kobo books (a different set of reviews for paper and digital, unlike Amazon)
    • Barnes and Noble
    • Nook books (as with Kobo, a different set of reviews for paper and digital)
    • Google Play Books
    • Good Reads
    • Shelfari
    • Library Thing

I’ve already automated a bunch of stuff on the browser front too so that I can open all those sites with one click, find the book, and start uploading the review. Some of them are already on Amazon, I uploaded them previously, but most of the other sites are new and relatively virgin territory (I’ve only uploaded reviews of four titles so far, and many of them had no previous reviews or ratings). It has taken a bit longer than I would like to upload the first few, but I’m getting a bit faster now that I’m used to the page interfaces.

Once that is done, I copy the final text from data entry over to the master list, and that first page has some calculated fields on it that also generates and formats my index entries for the website and the basic outline for my tweet update that the review is posted on my own site.

Automation should help streamline the review process somewhat, and I had to figure out my business process to get to this stage. Now that it’s done, and I’ve tested the model on the first four reviews, I’m excited to upload a backlog of another 30 old ones and get started on my goal of 50 new ones for the year.

A life spent reviewing…RIP Harriet Klausner

The PolyBlog
November 2 2015

I was saddened to read today that Amazon’s most prolific reviewer, Harriet Klausner, passed away at age 63. (The woman who wrote 31,014 Amazon book reviews and upended the Internet, dead at 63 – The Washington Post).

I met Harriet through the Dorothy-L newsgroup back in the late 1990s. I confess that I didn’t particularly like her style of review, a little too positive without enough critique and a little too pun-laden for my tastes. She almost always posted positive reviews, partly as she said that unless the book was good, she didn’t read past page 50, and sometimes not even that far. I admired her dedication to writing and posting the reviews. And, like anyone who posts away, and in such a prolific fashion, you get the fans and the haters, sometimes in equal measures.

The fans were obvious. Legions of people read her reviews and followed her missives; publishers included her gushes on the covers of book-jackets. The haters were equally legendary, often emboldened by finding other skeptics. Most of their popular criticisms of her had little resonance with me.

They questioned how one person could read so many books so fast. I too could read 3-4 books in a day if I had the time, and have done so many times. I don’t do it very often, and it has to be a certain type of book — serials, procedurals, Travis McGee sized novels, etc. Lots of YA. My record from my mis-spent youth was seven Three Investigator stories in a go, and from my adult years, 5 Kinsey Millhone stories in a go. I don’t recommend it, as they all blend together. So I had no trouble believing she was reading them all although as with most speed-readers who are not photographic-readers, retention becomes an issue even within hours of finishing the book. Even Harry Potter, for example — many people spent hours engrossed in the pages over several days; I read the fourth one (the first big one), in a single go, one day. It’s an immersive-type experience, but there’s little time to savour the flavour before it’s done. It’s almost like fast food instead of a gourmet meal. If I went into full skim-read mode, I could finish the first one in about 1.5 to 2 hours. And, if I was really into it, I could skim read 10 books in a day. Not my idea of fun, but to each their own.

They questioned the validity of her review, often citing the fact that her reviews were short, relatively content free, and error-prone. I find those same “errors” to be more reminiscent of someone who skim-reads tons of books, then sits down to review and finds that the details aren’t as sharp as they were when she finished the book. Jim becomes John; Mike becomes Martin. I have the same problem when I’m reviewing TV episodes — if I don’t do the review right after the episode, i.e. as soon as it ends, I find it really hard to go back and write the one-line tweet review even four episodes later. They just all blend together. Add in the fact that her reviews weren’t really reviews, they were short blurbs, about the equivalent of a dust-jacket and dashed together in 3 minutes with no going back to ensure she got the name right, etc. Not my style, but she was a perfect example of a type of internet dweller — the prolific commenter, writer, reviewer who cares more about writing a review and posting it to share their opinion than proof-reading, editing, tweaking, fact-checking. It’s a quick review, not painstaking journalism.

Harriet is, in my respects, the opposite of me when it comes to writing reviews. She could dash off 150 words and consider herself done, sending it out into the world. My reviews have detailed structures — plot / premise, what I liked, what I didn’t like, a summary, info about publisher, year, stars, series, tags — and I’ve agonized over things to include or not. I’ve spent 2 hours reading a short novel, and another hour writing the review to get it down to 300 words that I think are fair, reasoned, pithy but substantive. I’m anal. If it goes out the door with my name on it, I fuss. The result? Really low volume of reviews. I have tons of books on my TB Reviewed list because they are just too time consuming. I can’t let go.

So while I could never switch to Harriet’s approach (short, formulaic, and in some cases error-laden), I wish I had her laissez-faire approach. It’s just a short review, one of hundreds. For me, even if people don’t agree with my review, I hope they find it helpful. Thorough even. In a word, professional, which falsely suggests that I think Harriet wasn’t…in actuality, I think it was just a different standard of self-analness.

A frequent complaint was also that she *gasp* profited from her amateur reviews. She probably did, in at least four ways, but not in the way most people assume. There’s no evidence, ever, that she “sold” reviews, so let’s ignore that particular claim — people assume she must have been selling them to do so many, since why would she do it for free, but that was how her brain was wired. And is likely linked to the first form of profit — there is a huge selfish thrill to having people read your reviews. I love it. It’s addictive. I suspect, without knowing of course, that this was her main drive, and if so, she profited immensely. 30,000 reviews? Millions of people reading her reviews. Secondly, she was an Amazon affiliate too I believe. So if they clicked on her review site and got to Amazon to buy it, she would have got a few pennies if something sold. Is it enough to live on? Hardly. But it might pay for a few books a year. Third, she got TONS of free books from publishers. As an executive mentioned back in ’05, it was a way to get yourself reviewed when the big reviewers didn’t have space for you. Harriet would read just about anything. And did! Plus, it was risk-free — if she didn’t like it, she would stop reading it early, and not rate it. If she finished it, you would get at least 3 stars and probably 4 or 5. Again, risk free.

The fourth way she “profited” was how she got into some hot water with people, and understandably so. All those free books? She sold them off used on used book websites. And I totally understand why some people would say, “Wait, I sent that to you for free, you can’t sell it and make money!”. I get that, makes sense. But I do know there’s a larger spectrum at play, another side so to speak, which is part of what was apparently stressing her out — she was throwing them out, didn’t have room to keep them all. A pretty large volume. It’s hard to imagine a former librarian not finding that incredibly traumatic on its own. Plus, lots of people said, “Hey, shouldn’t you give those away instead?” so that they wouldn’t end up in landfill. Plus another group of more mercantile types who said, “No way, don’t give them away, sell them, you did all that work, you should get something for it!”.

Taking books out of the equation for a second, partly as it is so visceral to the soul of a reader, this is to me just human nature — some people can get quite lively about whether you throw something out like a used toaster vs. e-recycling it vs. donating it to Value Village vs. trying to sell it online. In that vein, I have a used microwave. Works fine, a few years old, we bought a bigger more powerful one. But the old one works great. Do I want to sell it? Not really. I’d be far happier to give it to someone who needs it than sell it, but I have family and friends who think that is almost heresy. Equally, I have 3000 books I need to get rid of — if someone would take them for free and use them, I’d happily give them to them. They represent thousands of dollars of my investment, so there are TONS of people who are aghast that I’m not trying to have a book sale of my own, or donating to the library (they won’t take them, too many and too old) or a host of other options because “Well, they’re worth money.” I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable selling ARCs, but I can understand that not everyone has the same reservations as me. I hate the idea of the profit, but I love the idea they’re not being recycled. I wonder if the people would feel differently if they were sold, but all proceeds went to a literacy charity?

None of these criticisms really resonate with me, because in the end, it comes down to something far simpler for me.

Some people liked her, some people loathed her. Yet for the authors of the books for the 31000 reviews she did, they generally got a 4-star review and some positive words about their story posted by someone who didn’t know them, wasn’t related to them, and didn’t profit much (if at all) from doing the review.

I didn’t always agree with her, I didn’t know her that well. But I’m saddened she’s gone from the review world…

She came, she read, she reviewed a life spent reading. There are far worse legacies.

Rethinking Canadian Aid by Edited by Stephen Brown, Molly den Heyer and David R. Black (2015) – BR00191 (2015) – 🐸🐸⚪⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
March 9 2015

Plot or Premise

This academic analysis of recent Canadian international development assistance is long on political economy and light on “realities on the ground”.

What I Liked

The text had a strong opening for its goals, even if the administrative context didn’t quite match their estimated / presumed political context. When it came to hard statistical analysis (Chapter 6) and mimicry of other donors, the paper was sound. Chapter 12 on children at risk, and the potential for mainstreaming, had potential but was undersold.

What I Didn’t Like

The book had a lot of rhetoric and assumptions than analysis of ethical consensus and normativism (Chapters 1-3), results reporting and power dynamics (Chapter 4, 5, 10), Corporate Social responsibility (Chapter 7, 15, 16), links to military spending for peacekeeping (Chapter 8, 9, 13,14), and soundbite announcements masquerading as policies (Chapter 11).

Disclosure

I am not personal friends with the editors, but I am friends with the author of one of the chapters.

The Bottom Line

More rhetoric than real analysis.

Coffee Break Mysteries by William S. Shepherd (2011) – BR00028 (2011) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
April 26 2011

Plot or Premise

A collection of 20 solve-them-yourself mysteries, perfect for reading on your break. For context, the stories are all short, suitable for reading one or two on a coffee break. If you have seen the 5-minute mysteries in the back of magazines like Reader’s Digest or remember the old Encyclopedia Brown series, then you understand the premise — you read a short-short story (almost flash length) with a mystery of “who did something”, ending with the narrator announcing that she or he knows the solution. Then, as the reader, you are challenged to figure out the mystery too. Turn the page, and voila, the solution from the story’s narrator to see if you’re right.

What I Liked

Sometimes when you see this type of story presented in magazines, the author doesn’t play fair — they hide a piece of evidence, or they play games with personal pronouns to trick you into thinking the character named “Chris” is a man but is really a woman. In this collection, I was happy to see that all of the mysteries play out completely fairly — in almost all cases, the information you need to solve them is provided completely within the text of the story. (There are three small exceptions to this where you need to have some basic knowledge of American or literary history.) I also really liked the Ask Martha “collection within a collection”. These are all stories with the same narrator — Crusher Davis, an ex-athlete turned sportswriter who also writes an “Ask Martha” column for the newspaper on the sly. It is odd, but the continuing character really helps the stories feel more vibrant, and more easily digestible. Of the six stories with Davis, The Arsonist and the Baseball Mystery are two of the best mysteries in the entire collection. Finally, the last story (Is It A Wonderful Life) is one of the best of the collection, except there aren’t enough suspects or meat to the story. Overall, here are the stories I liked the best:

  • The Pilgrim Thanksgiving — A holiday pageant at a school concludes with a test — which of the stories was historically inaccurate? Rating: 4.00;
  • Edgar Allan Poe’s Mysterious Visitor — A group of local Poe lovers want to take over the graveside vigil of the anonymous Mysterious Visitor who comes to Poe’s grave every year, but to be chosen, they must pass a test about Poe. Rating: 3.00;
  • The White House Ghosts — Four former Presidents decide to leave a gift for the new President’s children…but which President is represented by the gift? Rating: 4.00;
  • Ask Martha – The St. Patrick’s Day Mystery — Somebody spikes the drink at a fundraiser, but who turned the green celebration blue? Rating: 4.00;
  • Ask Martha – The Arsonist — Somebody is setting fires around town, and the tipline produces some leads…but only one leads to the firebug. Rating: 4.50;
  • Ask Martha – The Identify Thief — A group of friends go out for lunch, one comes home without a credit card. Rating: 3.00;
  • Ask Martha – The Jackie Mitchell Autographed Baseball Mystery — A dying old man has a special baseball on his mantle that goes missing as soon as he dies. Rating: 4.50;
  • The Miser’s Hoard — An old miser dies, leaving a small treasure hidden in the wall…but when it is about to be divided up, somebody sneaks an early withdrawal. Rating: 3.00;
  • The Gourmet Mystery — Who was a pig that ate the expensive truffles and didn’t want to pay for them? Rating: 3.00;
  • Is It A Wonderful Life? — An old man dies of an overdose — was it an accident, or a prescription for murder? Rating: 3.50;

What I Didn’t Like

All of the stories are rated PG — which is only a problem in the sense that some of the characters seem uni-dimensional like they’re stuck in an episode of Leave It To Beaver (one involves naive students pickpocketing people, which is dismissed as a prank because they apologize). At least three of the stories rely on an assessment of character (such as a person’s religious devotion) to eliminate suspects, which hardly registers as “evidence” to the normal mystery reader (in one case, a religious devotee is cleared of stealing a religious artifact because he is too devoted to stealing). The solutions aren’t that complicated, but if the nuance was added that the police/narrator would prioritize their investigation on the main suspect first, rather than the narrator declaring “I know who did it”, it would be a little softer to read. And easier to agree with the solution presented. Often times I had it narrowed down to two suspects and agreed the “correct” one was more likely, but I couldn’t eliminate the other one on the evidence alone. Here are my ratings for the short mysteries that I didn’t particularly enjoy:

  • Who Poisoned George Washington? — George is poisoned while visiting New York, and there are four suspects. Rating: 2.50;
  • A Dream of Old Salem — A girl dreams of a witch trial in old Salem, but which of the witnesses is lying? Rating: 2.50;
  • Stealing Second Base — A baseball base is stolen from a display case and three students had the opportunity. Rating: 1.50;
  • Lost (Stolen) and Found — A purse of money is found in the woman’s washroom at the diner…but who put it there? Rating: 2.50;
  • Ask Martha – The Pickpocket — People are losing their wallets around town, and a small pool of suspects has already formed. Rating: 2.00;
  • Ask Martha – The Shoplifter — Four people write to Martha for help, followed by the police — and all of them are related stories about potential five-finger discounts. Rating: 2.50;
  • What the Dickens – A Christmas Eve Mystery — A re-imagining of Dickens’ Oliver Twist and his reunion with his family. Rating: 1.00;
  • The Twelfth Night Mystery — The Three Wise Kings visit a little girl in modern times, bringing gold, frankincense and myrrh — and a kitten! Rating: 2.50;
  • The Crusader’s Robe — A ship is returning from the Crusades with treasures, and somebody pilfers one. Who was it? Rating: 2.00;
  • The Geneva Summit Goldfish Mystery — Reagan goes to Geneva to meet a goldfish. Rating: 1.00;

Disclosure

I received a free reader’s copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review. I am not personal friends with the author, but I have interacted with them briefly on social media.

The Bottom Line

A treat for your coffee break.