BILL S. BALLINGER – Portrait in Smoke. Harper, hardcover, 1950. Signet #897, paperback reprint, September 1951. Film: Columbia Pictures, 1956, as Wicked As They Come (with Arlene Dahl, Phil Carey & Herbert Marshall).

   Ballinger pioneered a new novelistic approach in the mystery field, one that he utilized in several novels: first-person narration told from the point of view of a professional or amateur detective, alternating with third-person narration involving one or more of the other characters in the story. This enabled him to tell two different yet parallel stories that intersect at or near the end, thereby heightening suspense throughout.

   Portrait in Smoke is the first of his split-narration novels, and the book that firmly established his name in the mystery field. The first-person narrator is Danny April, the new owner of a small-time collection agency in Chicago, who finds in the agency files an old photograph of one Krassy Almauniski, a local beauty queen, and falls so in love with her image that he is compelled to track her down.

   Interwoven with the details of his increasingly puzzling and sinister search, which leads him from the stockyard slums to a modeling school and the Chicago opera, is the third-person chronicle of Krassy’s life after winning the Stockyard Weekly News beauty contest — an account that is anything but a Cinderella story.

   The dust jacket blurb says that Portrait in Smoke has “depth and power, unusual suspense, brilliant irony, hard-boiled wit, one of the most fascinating heroines in current fiction, and a whiplash ending.” It isn’t that good, but it is a first-rate crime novel that deserves attention from the contemporary reader.

   Whether it is Ballinger’s best split-narration novel is debatable; some aficionados of his work prefer The Wife of the Red-Haired Man (1957), which has a more complex plot and a more dazzling surprise at the end. Also good are The Tooth and the Nail (1955) and The Longest Second (1957); the latter title has one of the most frightening first chapters in all of suspense fiction.

   In addition to the many novels under his own name, Ballinger also wrote two under pseudonyms: The Black, Black Hearse (1955), as by Frederic Freyer; and The Doom-Maker (1959), as by B. X. Sanborn.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

JONATHAN GANT – Never Say No to a Killer. Ace Double D-157, paperback original; 1st printing, 1956. Published back-to-back with Stab in the Dark, by Louis Trimble.

   Jonathan Gant, as it turns out — I didn’t remember it when I picked this one out from my upstairs book closet on Monday — was a pen name of Clifton Adams, who wrote a few other tough crime novels for Gold Medal, but was mostly known for his westerns. One of Bill Crider’s Gold Medal columns for Mystery*File talks about him extensively, and you can read it here.

   As a tough guy, Roy Surrat, the protagonist in Never Say No is as hard-boiled as they come. In prison for five years for what he calls a botched bank robbery, he kills two guards in making a well-planned escape. The only thing that goes wrong, he discovers, is that his primary accomplice, a former cellmate, is dead.

   As part of the escape plan, he’s picked up instead by Dorris Venci, the dead man’s wife. Suspicious at first, he decides to take her up on getting rid of Alex Burton, the ex-governor of the state. Dorris is sure had her husband bumped off, and she’s afraid that she is next. One big bonus is the evidence Roy’s former partner in crime had accumulated against all his enemies — big time crooks, all of them, some in high power.

   Blackmail, any one? The more Surrat entrenches himself into the dirty politics of Lake City (no state mentioned), the more you know he’s heading for a fall, and as in all good noir dramas, fall he does — which includes falling for Alex Burton’s girl friend, maybe not the smartest thing in the world, and dumping Mrs. Venci, which may be even a worse mistake.

   But in good noir novels do the protagonists listen to you, the reader? No, and women are always (or almost always) their means to a bad end. (I hope I didn’t give anything away.)

   It’s a good story, but in all honesty, as the leading man in this quickly-paced melodrama, Roy Surrat is a difficult character to swallow. He’s a mad dog killer, but he tells his story intelligently and is well-versed in Nietzschean philosophy. While I don’t remember him describing himself, he also seems attractive enough to women, although at least one of them has a serious character disorder herself.

   But no matter — Surrat’s downfall is of his own making, and if you’re clever enough, Jonathan Gant plots the tale carefully enough that maybe you can spot the clue that starts Surrat’s fate unraveling in the wrong direction right at the time it does.

BEACH BLANKET BINGO. American International Pictures (1965). Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Deborah Walley, Harvey Lembeck, John Ashley, Jody McCrea, Donna Loren, Marta Kristen, Linda Evans, Timothy Carey, Don Rickles, Paul Lynde, Donna Michelle, Buster Keaton, Earl Wilson. Director: William Asher.

   You’d be hard pressed to get me to describe a coherent plot, at least in any traditional understanding of the term, in Beach Blanket Bingo. Directed by William Asher, the American International beach party movie stars Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello in a celluloid mélange of singing, slapstick vignettes, and comic antics.

   In this installment of the popular beach movies series, the romantic singing duo try their hand at skydiving; meet an upcoming female singer, Sugar Kane (Linda Evans) and her agent; and watch in skepticism as their friend named Bonehead (Jody McCrea, son of Joel) gets romantically entangled with a mermaid.

   While quite a bit of the humor in Beach Blanket Bingo falls flat, as if the movie’s creators were just trying way too hard to get a guffaw out of teenage movie audiences, some of the borderline absurdist humor works extraordinarily well.

   This is in no small part to the fine work of Timothy Carey as South Dakota Slim, a psychotic pool player; Paul Lynde as Sugar Kane’s ruthless agent; and Don Rickles as the owner of a skydiving school. All three men, each of whom was well known to audiences in the 1960s, maintain a singular presence in this silly, although quite enjoyable, little genre-defying film.

   And speaking of cameos, look for Earl Wilson as well as the legendary Buston Keaton in one of his last film roles.

   Speaking of Buster. What makes Beach Blanket Bingo worth watching, especially for people who truly love cinema, is that the movie is really best understood as a tribute to the silent film era, an homage which reaches its peak in the final scene in which Frankie saves Sugar Kane from the increasingly unhinged South Dakota Slim’s (Carey) clutches. It’s something right out of The Perils of Pauline.

   And just in case the audience didn’t get the reference, two of the characters are there to remind you that what you’re watching is a tribute to something very special in cinematic history that existed long before Frankie and Annette came on the scene.

   Beach Blanket Bingo may not be a great movie in the traditional sense. It’s unlikely often discussed in film schools. But it is nevertheless kind of a perfect movie for those people who appreciate that cinema, when done correctly, can provide immeasurable, if only temporary, escapism from everyday life.

   So, is Beach Blanket Bingo a serious film? Not at all. But is it, provided you’re in the right mindset, an entertaining (if a bit stupid) movie? Definitely.

WILLIAM G. TAPPLY – The Snake Eater. Brady Coyne #12. Otto Penzler Books, hardcover, 1993. Minotaur Books, softcover, 2000, as one of three novels in Snake Eater/Seventh Enemy/Close to the Bone: A Brady Coyne Omnibus.

   I’ve enjoyed Tapply’s stories of Boston lawyer Brady Coyne over the years. Evidently others have, too, judging from the series’ longevity and Otto Penzler snapping Tapply up for his new press. Though Coyne is a lawyer, it should be noted for those new to the series that these are not “lawyer” books, and that he really functions more as a private detective.

   The book opens with a man whom we do not know being stabbed to death in a NYC subway. Then we shift to our hero Brady as he receives a call from his old friend in the Justice Department, Charlie McDivitt, asking him to defend a Viet Nam vet who has been busted for growing marijuana in his back yard.

   It develops that the vet is a victim of Agent Orange poisoning and needs the evil weed to alleviate his symptoms. Coyne prepares for a tough case, but the charges are dropped unexpectedly, and no one is willing to say why. Then the vet is brutally murdered, and no one seems terribly interested in finding out why, or by whom — except, of course, Coyne.

   Tapply does his usual job of smooth storytelling, and Coyne is his usual engaging self. There is a bit of middle-aged soul searching on his part as one of his relationships goes awry, which serves to deepen the characterization a bit.

   The eventual resolution of the plot in its broad outline (if not all details) was discernible early on, as perhaps it was meant to be. It was not terribly credible to me, and the identity of the killer still less so. Tapply remains one of the better in the field in terms of readable prose, but I found this to be a distinctly minor effort. I wasn’t sorry I read it, but I wish there had been more there. He can do, and has done, better.

Editorial Comments:   William G. Tapply was last mentioned on this blog back in 2009, at the time of his death. Included in that post was a complete bibliography for him. The Snake Eater was the 12th Brady Coyne novel out of 24, not counting three crossover outings with J. W. Jackson and Tapply’s fellow author and good friend Philip R Craig.

   It has been over two years since one of Barry Gardner’s reviews has graced the pages of this blog. Other than the fact that some of the reviews I have access to cannot be scanned but must be re-typed from scratch, there has been no big reason for this.

   For those of you who may not familiar with Barry Gardner, let me repeat my introduction to the first of his reviews to appear here:

   I never met Barry myself. He lived in Texas, I lived in Connecticut. He attended mystery conventions, I seldom did nor have I since. But we were in DAPA-Em together, and we enjoyed each other’s reviews there, and swapped mailing comments there. We were friends, albeit through the mail and through each other’s zines only.

   Barry worked for the Dallas Fire Department until his retirement in 1989, but he didn’t discover mystery fandom for another two years or so. Ah, Sweet Mysteries was the name of the zine that he produced for the apa, each of them running 20 pages or more. Besides his own zine, his reviews began popping up in all of the major, well-known mystery fanzines of the day: The Armchair Detective, CADS, Deadly Pleasures and many others. You name it, he was there.

   Not only was he prolific, but he always managed to put his finger on what made each novel he reviewed work, or (in such cases) why it didn’t. Instinctively and incisively, he seemed to know detective and mystery fiction inside out. He had a critical eye, but he invariably used it softly while cutting immediately to the essence of a story.

   Barry died in 1996 — suddenly, without any warning. George Easter, who still publishes Deadly Pleasures, almost immediately set up the Barry Awards in his name, to honor the Best in Detective and Mystery Fiction on a yearly basis. See George’s website for more information.

   I’m pleased more than I can say that Barry’s wife Ellen has granted me permission to reprint Barry’s reviews from Ah, Sweet Mysteries on this blog. Thank you, Ellen, very much.

THE FIRM. Paramount Pictures, 1993. Tom Cruise, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Gene Hackman, Hal Holbrook, Terry Kinney, Wilford Brimley, Ed Harris, Holly Hunter, David Strathairn, Gary Busey, Steven Hill. Based on the novel by John Grisham. Director: Stanley Pollack.

   The Firm takes stabs at evoking a fairly interesting dichotomy between the monied privileged college-degreed Haves vs. the working-stiff Secretaries, Truck Drivers, Small-Time Operators and other Have-Nots, but director Sidney Pollack soft-pedals this, lest he offend the upwardly mobile types the film (and the book it rode in on) is marketed toward.

   After his promising early efforts, like the beguiling, pretentious Castle Keep or the fitfully elegiac Jeremiah Johnson, I’m disappointed to see Pollack work so hard at being slickly professional, but he does accomplish one pleasantly quirky effect: The whole theater cheered when lovable, crusty old Wilfred Brimley got the tar beat out of him. And I never thought I’d see that in a Movie.

DEAD MEN DON’T WEAR PLAID. Universal Pictures, 1982. Steve Martin, Rachel Ward, Carl Reiner. Archive footage: Alan Ladd, Barbara Stanwyck, Ray Milland, Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Veronica Lake, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, Edward Arnold, Kirk Douglas, Fred MacMurray, James Cagney, Joan Crawford, Charles Laughton, Vincent Price, William Conrad, Charles McGraw, Jeff Corey, John Miljan, Brian Donlevy, Norma Varden, Edmond O’Brien. Co-written and directed by Carl Reiner.

   [The most disappointing film of the summer of 1982] for me has been Carl Reiner’s 1940s pastiche, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. I thought the opening, as Rachel Ward, looking smashing, faints on private eye Steve Martin’s office stoop, was a perfect beginning to what I fully expected to be a delightful ninety minutes, but expectations have seldom been as cruelly dashed as they were for me on that unhappy Wednesday afternoon.

   After experiencing some momentary pleasure at the sometimes skillful blending of cuts from classic and not-so-classic forties film with the narrative, I began to feel hostility toward the tricksters who had hoked up some splendid film clips and was downright angry with Carl Reiner’s outrageously bad and unfunny Nazi impersonation that closes the film.

   Or almost closes it. The end credits in which the familiar faces and films from the past were identified was fun and suggested to me that this might have been a good idea for a very short film but was a very bad idea for a feature-length one.

   Both Martin and Ward were fetching, Miklos Rosza had written a good pastiche of his own style, and the black-and-white photography was refreshing.

   I think that part of my dissatisfaction with Dead Men was the fact that within the last month I had seen a batch of films noir. I saw them under the best and worst of circumstances: with a small group of film people in a University Media Center screening room where we sat on what felt like stone seats.

   I had either not seen many of the films or had not seen them in thirty years, and for several of the other viewers it was a first viewing of what is just a sampling from it very rich period, 1945-1955. I am not going to review all of the eight films in detail, but I want to list them and re-port on some of my impressions.

Editorial Comment:   Coming Soon!

  CHARLES WILLIAMS – The Hot Spot. Vintage/Black Lizard, softcover, 1990. Originally published as Hell Hath No Fury: Gold Medal #286, paperback original, February 1953. Film: Orion, 1990 (starring Don Johnson, Virginia Madsen and Jennifer Connelly).

   If asked to pick an archetypal roman noir from the 1950’s you could probably do a lot worse than The Hot Spot. Average-ish guy moves into average-ish small town, where an opportunity for a bank heist proves too tempting to resist.

   Charles Williams makes a case for being a storyteller on par with the best of his era (Willeford, Thompson, or my benchmark John D. MacDonald): the novel is fast and lean, and filled with noir nuggets such as “When you break the law you can forget about playing the averages because you have to win all the time.”

   Of course The Hot Spot also features a good good-girl and a very bad bad-girl — the latter maybe one of the better femmes in pulp fiction: “I thought of a full and slightly bruised peach beginning to spoil a little. She was somewhere between luscious and full-bloom and in another year or so of getting all her exercise lying down and lifting the bottle she’d probably be blowzy.”

   Dolly Harshaw is a deadly piece of work who lives up to this novel’s original (and much better) title Hell Hath No Fury. Williams is a great writer, and I look forward to reading more of his work.

WILLIAM H. FIELDING – Take Me As I Am. Gold Medal #272, paperback original; 1st printing, November 1952.

   One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2015 is to read (or re-read) as many of my collection of old Gold Medal paperbacks as I can, primarily if not solely the crime and mystery ones. GM also printed westerns and general fiction, often with noirish themes and overtones, but I’ll concentrate on the crime novels that made their reputation, then (back in the 1950s) as well as now as the best source of true noir fiction on the planet.

   And obviously I’ll be reporting back here as I go. I think it will be one of my first-of-2015 promises to myself that I’ll keep.

   And Take Me As I Am is as tough and noirish as they come, and I’ll get to the story line in just a minute. But first I’d like to point out that William H. Fielding was the pen-name for Darwin L. Teilhet, who under his own name and often in collaboration with his wife Hildegarde wrote (among others) a series of Golden Age of Detection mysteries featuring a character called Baron von Kaz.

   I don’t know very much about their early books, but Doug Greene has this to say about them, in part: “…fair play detective novels of the 1930’s, sometimes with impossible crimes (The Ticking Terror Murders, Death Flies High, Murder In the Air) and generally with a Liberal social attitude — The Talking Sparrow Murders is strongly anti-Nazi at a time when too many people thought of the Nazis as merely German nationalists. Also noteworthy are four novels featuring the Baron Von Kaz.”

   Teilhet then turned to spy thrillers in the 1940s, and when the Gold Medal paperback revolution came along in the early 1950s, he apparently saw an opportunity there too and jumped on board. The other Fielding books in Hubin is The Unpossessed (GM #202, 1951), which I hope to get to sooner, if I can, rather than later. Not in Hubin is Beautiful Humbug (GM #430, 1954), which is about a notorious female swindler. It takes place in 1860s San Francisco, with one source describing it as historical fiction, but I have a feeling that it is true crime instead.

   Take Me As I Am starts out slowly, with a strong sense of déjà vu, one of those books that if you’ve read widely in the field of early noir fiction, you’re sure you’ve read before. Alma, a young blonde girl in her early 20s, is the getaway driver for a gang of mobsters in an armored car robbery that goes bad. Suddenly she finds herself on her own, driving a car with a suitcase in the back full of money, $100,000 worth, in fact.

   In desperation, looking for a way to drive through the roadblocks that have been set up in the area, she picks up a young hitchhiker named Bill Owens, four years younger than she and making his way to Sacramento for a job that he hopes is waiting for him there.

   It doesn’t happen immediately, but there is an attraction between the two that begins to grow. Standing between them, though, although he doesn’t know it, is the money. Alma is torn between the two: young Bill, whose wholesome naiveté is so appealing, or the $100,000 in cash.

   There are also plenty of twists ahead. I somehow lost track along the way, but there is more than a double-cross on the part of someone involved. It is instead a triple-cross and (gangsters being what they are) perhaps one beyond that. It takes a lot of coincidences to occur for all of the pieces together, but as in the best of Cornell Woolrich, Fielding makes us believe them at the time.

   Picking up momentum as it goes, the last 30 pages of Take Me As I Am can be read in one 15 minute gulp. The ending will please any fan of noir fiction, I guarantee it.

TUAREG: THE DESERT WARRIOR. Aspa Producciones Cinematográficas, Italy, 1984. Original title: Tuareg – Il guerriero del deserto. Mark Harmon, Luis Prendes, Ritza Brown, Paolo Malco, Aldo Sambrell, Ennio Girolami, Antonio Sabato. Based on the novel Tuareg by Alberto Vázquez Figueroa. Director: Enzo G. Castellari.

   Tuareg: The Desert Warrior is a movie about lines, literal and metaphorical, in the sand. Directed by Enzo G. Castellari (Keoma), the action-adventure film stars Mark Harmon (NCIS) as Gacel Sayah. He’s a North African nomadic tribesman steadfastly clinging to a pre-modern code of honor in the modern age. The viewer is expected to empathize with Sayah, all the while cognizant of the disastrous results that inevitably follow from his stubbornness and refusal to bow to the conventions of the post-colonial era.

   The movie benefits from good pacing and a quite good performance by Harmon, who seems to be taking the role seriously. Tuareg: The Desert Warrior doesn’t play it light; in many ways, it’s a quite bleak, often times graphically violent film. And if you can get over the fact that the future Jethro Gibbs is portraying an Arab tribesman, it’s a pretty darn good action flic with some seriously great “Rambo moments,” if you know what I mean.

   The action begins when two bedraggled men stumble into Sayah’s desert encampment. Sayah doesn’t much care who they are or where they came from. Believing deeply that hospitality is a cardinal virtue in the scorching hot desert, he considers these men to be his guests and hence, under his protection. So it’s not surprising that he refuses to turn these men over to the Arab soldiers when they show up in his camp.

   Sayah is, in his heart and mind, beholden to the law of the desert, where hospitality demands certain actions be taken by a host to protect his guests. When the soldiers kill one of the men and haul away another as a prisoner, Sayah is determined to uphold the law of hospitality, no matter the tragic consequences to him and to his family.

   As it turns out, his former guest, the man who he seeks to free from imprisonment in a desert fortress, is no ordinary man. He is the deposed president of the newly independent North African nation in which Sayah lives. Of course, desert nomad that he is, Sayah doesn’t really believe in those types of lines in the sand.

   An Italian-Spanish (and Israeli?) co-production, Tuareg: The Desert Warrior is replete with political subtexts. The issues of national unification, colonialism and independence, and political corruption are very much present. Sayah tells one of the Arab soldiers sent to capture him: “I do not understand a government that breaks the law, and then wants to punish me for it. It is stupid!” Contemporary Italian audiences may have appreciated that line quite a bit, but I have a feeling that a lot of people might appreciate it even more today.

   There’s something quite anarchic, even subversive, about Harmon’s character. Sayah is a man truly apart, often completely ignorant about the ways of the world. And as the stunning – shocking, really – ending demonstrates, sometimes being true to one’s code of honor has a way of backfiring.

   I didn’t see the ending coming. Which is perhaps one reason why I’d recommend you take a look at this movie. It’s not the greatest 1980s action film. Not by a long shot, but for what it is, it is pretty good celluloid escapism. But you’re going to have to get used to seeing Mark Harmon dressed as a desert nomad.

UMBERTO ECO – The Prague Cemetery. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, US, hardcover, November 2011. First published: October 2010. Translated by Richard Dixon.

   â€œIf I have become French, it is only because I couldn’t bear being Italian.”

   I warn you this is not an easy book and when you know its subject, many of you may choose not to read it. If you appreciate literate, witty, and brilliant writing though, you should. It is one of the best books I’ve read in years once I recognized where Eco was going. That he pulls off the tightwire act that this book is will be reason enough to read it.

   The quote above is the voice of the narrator of Umberto Eco’s novel The Prague Cemetery, Captain Simone Simoini, the grandson of the actual historical figure Captain Simonini. Simone is our narrator, or one of them, and a worse human being is hard to imagine. Racist, jingoist, police spy, terrorist (19th Century style), propagandist, plagiarist …. keep that last in mind, because that last little skill will define Simone Simonini as one of the worst men whoever lived.

   The Prague Cemetery sweeps across 19th Century Europe from the revolutionary period of the late 1840‘s (1848 the key year) to 1895 with the turn of the century in view. Through it we follow Simone into every back corner, byway, narrow alley, and cordite-smelling conspiracy of that conspiratorial age, with a small army of historical figures such as his grandfather, Garibaldi, Leo Taxil, Serge Nilus, an alienist he insists on calling Froide who convinces him to reveal his story…

   Some of those names may not be familiar, but they would be if you knew the history of conspiracy in that era. All the while he is shadowed and haunted by the mysterious young Jesuit priest Abbe Dalla Picola, who shares the narration of the story and the author’s prejudices including his hatred and fear of women.

   It is a world of violence and lies. Italian freedom fighters allegedly strangle priests with their own intestines, the Freemasons plot against everyone and the Jesuits plot against them (“Jesuits are Mason’s dressed like women”), French anarchists plant bombs and celebrate blasphemous Black Mass while the turbulent history of Italian unification, the Paris Commune, and the Dreyfuss affair play their role.

   All through this the paranoid, backstabbing Simone wiggles like a serpent his sting along a trail of lies, half truths, and sheer hatred of everyone and every thing. He is a maestro of invective, hatred, vitriol , and paranoia and everything is clouded by the secret services of myriad European countries all conspiring and coming to believe their own lies.

   Eco, a leading semiotician, philosopher, and medievalist among other things, burst on the best seller scene with The Name of the Rose and has visited often since. His books are always literate and often informed by his considerable sense of humor. That wit and humor are the saving grace of this book.

   This is a very funny book — black humor, but funny. At some point the narrator’s invective takes on an almost Marxian (Groucho, not Karl) air as he lies, cheats, spies, betrays, murders, and schemes his way through a conspiratorial whirl that makes modern talk radio sound tame. The book would be surreal at times if it wasn’t all unfortunately based on facts.

   And at the heart of this novel is one of the greatest lies ever fostered on humanity, one that is still believed by prejudiced fools all over the world today, appropriately a scene plagiarized from socialist feuillitonist Eugene Sue’s massive Mysteries of the People (Sue is identified as the narrator’s favorite writer.)

   In Sue’s novel the scene describes a meeting in a cemetery of Jesuit conspirators (Sue distrusted and loathed the Jesuits) in the hands of our plagiarist narrator the cemetery is the one in Prague and the conspiracy nothing less than The Protocols of Zion, and it is not a chapter in a novel, but presented as an actual event witnessed by the author (Serge Nilus who first published the Protocols claimed to have been given them by a friend who witnessed the event, the basis for Eco to spin his tale).

   Simone Simonini for the purposes of this book is no one less than the author of one of the most influential lies ever told, one with an almost direct link to one of the greatest crimes ever committed. A more unlikely protagonist is hard to imagine, but he and his story compel you to turn the page.

   Eco brings this world to life with almost magical skill, exploring all those dark byways of the soul with what one review in the Chicago Tribune rightly called “voluptuous abandon.” It is a cautionary tale for our world of undigested news, rumor, and innuendo, a reminder that information age or not the world has always embraced the great lie with the same zeal it does today. That Eco at times manages to also thrill, horrify, and be laugh out loud funny while revealing those lies is a wonder in itself.

   â€œA German produces on the average twice the feces of a Frenchman.”

   â€œWith Germans, as with women, one never gets to the point.”

   â€œNo one is as rude as a French innkeeper.”

   â€œThe Frenchman doesn’t know what he wants, he only knows he doesn’t want what he has.”

   â€œThe Italian is an untrustworthy, lying, contemptible traitor, himself more at ease with dagger than a sword, better with poison than medicine, a slippery bargainer, consistent only with changing sides in the wind…”

   I should point out Eco is Italian.

   On the Masons: “They are like the Jesuits only more confused.”

   â€œI hate women, what little I know of them.”

   On the brasseries of Paris and their patrons: “They are inverts looking for perverts of either sex…”

   â€œCivilization will never reach perfection until the last stone of the last church has fallen …”

   Priests: “They are idle and belong to a class as dangerous as thieves and vagrants …”

   â€œI would say religion is also the cocaine of the people…”

   â€œWe do not know whether animal spirit and genital fluid are the same thing …”

   â€œSomeone said that women are just a substitute for the solitary vice, only you need more imagination.”

   That all literally from Chapter 1.

   As Eco points out in a brief afterward, Simone is a collection of different people, a convenience for the writer, and as he concludes, “still among us.” There is also a mystery or two and a revelation that may catch you completely off guard that Simone never quite manages to put together. At times you can almost hear the real author of the Protocols chuckling as he spins his murderous lies, even to himself.

   This is a powerful work for all the smiles at its excess. It is impossible to read without the images we are all familiar with of where The Protocols lead, not alone, but with its words scribbled in venom and blood. That this novel can be read as entertainment and at the same time a serious statement about hate and lies is one of the reasons to admire and praise Eco’s talents.

   As an added bonus the books is filled with illustrations from the age though not as colorful as those from Eco’s earlier novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Lorna.

   I warn you, this is not for everyone, and I understand why anyone might choose not to read it (it is also nearly 500 pages of small type), but if you do, if you take it as it was written, why it was written, what it has to say to us now and about us then I think you too will find it a remarkable novel despite the difficult subject and the protagonist.

   It’s a very funny book about what may be the bloodiest lie ever told, a deadly serious study in paranoia and hateful speech that will have you smiling, and a fascinating journey through the very heart of the conspiratorial urge in man.