Grizzled old cop

The Bookman's Promise
Author: John Dunning • Publisher: Pocket Star Books
Price: ¥1,092 • ISBN: 0-7434-7629-8

It doesn't actually say so explicitly in The Bookman's Promise, but the hero — Cliff Janeway — seems to be a grizzled ex-cop. A grizzled ex-cop turned bibliophile. A novel hero, if you'll pardon the expression.

Janeway collects rare and expensive books. The author John Dunning is also a collector and trader of rare books and knows what he is talking about. Janeway is collecting the works of a famous British explorer of the Victorian era when he stumbles onto something.

An old lady on her deathbed tells Janeway she has been cheated out of a whole library of the explorer's books and notebooks. Will he get it back? Of course. This is a lady's deathbed request. Then one of Janeway's long-time chums is killed, apparently over these same books. Who or what can want these books suppressed so much they will commit murder? Someone who doesn't want the past known, that's who.

I hadn't before read a Dunning thriller — this is his third of the Janeway series — and I was struck by his no-nonsense, unaffected prose. Dunning is a real storyteller. His characters may not be the most rounded in fiction, but they are all on some level plausible; none have superpowers or are millionaire jetsetters or glow in the dark. The situations the characters get into are not unreasonable: the corpses do not pile up, nothing explodes in a giant fireball, no cities are nuked.

And Dunning's knowledge of his bookish subject imbues the story with authenticity, without ever lecturing or boring the reader. In this respect, The Bookman's Promise is an old-fashioned yarn, one that takes its time and takes the reader where it's going without artifice or nonsense. You are even glad that the nerdy bookman is a grizzled ex-cop, because with all those murdering bad-guy bookmen around Janeway is very reassuring company.

Grizzled old book

The Manchurian Candidate
Author: Richard Condon • Publisher: Pocket Star Books
Price: ¥966 • ISBN: 0-7434-8297-2

The original film version of the Manchurian Candidate, about a political assassin, hit the screens just a few months before JF Kennedy was shot. The film was withdrawn after the killing for being too, well, near the knuckle, for public view. Happily, we cannot take books off the shelf for being timely and relevant and Richard Condon's Manchurian Candidate has always been with us.

It is a classic of the Cold War, but as a new generation is finding, and Jonathan Demme is pointing out in his recent remake, the book retains bags of resonance.
Sgt. Raymond Shaw is a Korean War veteran and ex POW. The story begins when he gets back to the US after his internment and is awarded the Medal of Honour. This tough old soldier, at the grand age of 24, is catching up with the parents of some of the colleagues that didn't make it back. We see right away, he
is not one of the well-groomed, clean-cut heroes of yesteryear, but quite the magnificent cynic. He visits the disabled mother of a dead comrade and sees just a self absorbed and not very bright old biddy. The dead kid's father is a useless, sentimental lump.

Shaw keeps the cynicism well hidden. Well, he is getting the big gong for heroically saving his whole unit. Except, um, did he save them at all? Did anything they remember in the war actually happen? And to cap it all, Shaw turns out to be a sleeper agent of the Chinese. In his POW camp he was brainwashed and now at a certain signal he will become a killing machine at the heart of Washington power.
The prose is rough and uneven and veers between the gritty vernacular and the plain idiotic, but the story of power, and paranoia and exploitation chugs on relentlessly.

Book Reviews by Chris Page