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  • Biggles Flies South. My brother is a mad Biggles fan and I'd thought I'd read them all to him. Until this week when I happened across Flies South. Never heard of it before. I guess given I've got Flies East, Flies West and Flies North I should have guessed there was a Flies South as well. Anyway find of the week for me. It's just a middling Biggles adventure as he hunts for a lost Oasis in the desert and happens across an ancient, previously undiscovered tribe of Arabs who try to feed him to a crocodile as part of a ritual. It gets pretty racist in parts but you expect that from Biggles and that can't really be the reason it's obscure as there's far worse to be found in other adventures.

    Also tried to read Veronica Lake's autobiography which definitely appears to be ghost written. Turns out I don't care enough about Veronica Lake to put up with the prose stylings on show here.
    "Never let the fact that they are doing it wrong stop you from doing it right." Hyman Mandell.

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    • Originally posted by Dom D View Post
      Biggles Flies South. My brother is a mad Biggles fan and I'd thought I'd read them all to him. Until this week when I happened across Flies South. Never heard of it before. I guess given I've got Flies East, Flies West and Flies North I should have guessed there was a Flies South as well. Anyway find of the week for me. It's just a middling Biggles adventure as he hunts for a lost Oasis in the desert and happens across an ancient, previously undiscovered tribe of Arabs who try to feed him to a crocodile as part of a ritual. It gets pretty racist in parts but you expect that from Biggles and that can't really be the reason it's obscure as there's far worse to be found in other adventures.

      Also tried to read Veronica Lake's autobiography which definitely appears to be ghost written. Turns out I don't care enough about Veronica Lake to put up with the prose stylings on show here.
      I read wads of the Biggles books way back as a young 'un. Rip-roaring adventure - but some of them are much better than others. Flies East was one of the better books, IIRC.
      'You know, I'd almost forgotten what your eyes looked like. Still the same. Pissholes in the snow'

      http://www.paul-a-j-lewis.com (my photography website)
      'All explaining in movies can be thrown out, I think': Elmore Leonard

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      • Originally posted by Paul L View Post
        I read wads of the Biggles books way back as a young 'un. Rip-roaring adventure - but some of them are much better than others. Flies East was one of the better books, IIRC.
        The last 50 or so suck. I think W.E. Johns became a very tired man...

        Biggles Flies East is one of the best dozen or so. Pretty sure that's the first Von Stalhein story. The Gimlet and Worrals books are good fun too and never ran themselves intot he ground the way Biggles did.
        "Never let the fact that they are doing it wrong stop you from doing it right." Hyman Mandell.

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        • I can't believe it's been almost 3 months since I posted in this thread. Yikes! Anyway, I finished the books I was reading. Besides the stories from the collection FREAK SHOW that I mentioned before, Todd Robbins's "Spurs" - which the 1932 movie FREAKS was based on - reminded me just how lurid that tale is. I also really liked Fritz Leiber's "The Power of the Puppets," which had a really unique and insane twist. Both are classics.

          After that, I began thinking about the YEAR'S BEST HORROR STORIES series that ran from around 1970 to the early 1990's. The OCD bug bit me again when I noticed I had just six of them (1, 6, 7, 8, 10, and 13) and decided I wanted them all. I was going to buy one or two at a time, hoping to get the remaining sixteen I did not have by the end of the year. But as I researched them on Amazon and made a list comparing the available ones based on quality, price, and seller rating, I started thinking that the availability and price could change at any time. So, of course, I purchased all the ones I needed to fill in the missing gaps in one sitting. :)

          I've begun reading them since then - even the ones I already had - in chronological order. Despite the fact I owned it, I had forgotten that the first volume contains the pretty entertaining and shocking Richard Matheson story ("Prey") that the "Amelia" segment from TRILOGY OF TERROR was adapted from. Fantastic stuff.
          VHS will never die!

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          • I also added to the rotation the T. M. Wright novel A MANHATTAN GHOST STORY, another one that had been sitting on my "to-read" shelf. It has an interesting history, including a deal to turn it into a movie that was quite lucrative for a writer hired to adapt it for the screen (Ronald Bass was paid a couple million dollars), despite the fact it has yet to be filmed!

            I almost forgot, I finally finished PAPERBACKS FROM HELL. I had been treating it like a coffee table book, reading a couple of pages at a time when commercials popped up on TV. Folks, this book is absolutely terrific, and (in my opinion) it's probably the best book of any kind in the horror genre over the last 3 or 4 years. Not only did all the book covers on display throughout send me into nostalgia euphoria, but the writing constantly had me laughing. Here's an illustrative example from a section describing the tendency of many publishers (especially Zebra) to feature skeletons on their covers:

            "I have never discriminated against anyone based on the quantity of their skin, so it was educational to read The Children's Ward (1985) by Patricia Wallace and Allison's Baby (1988) by Mike Stone and realize that, yes, in fact all skeleton doctors are fabulously incompetent and should immediately be turned into xylophones."
            VHS will never die!

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            • Re-reading On The Road and first-time reading John Irving's Hotel New Hampshire.

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              • Picked up the new Stephen King Hard Case Crime book today. Looks good.

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                I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.

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                • I almost grabbed that the other day. But realized I got every King novel from the past 12 years and haven't read any of them.

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                    Got this in the other day. It's a book I have wanted to read since I first heard about it in 86 or so. Only 3 chapters in but so far it has been great. Yea I have heard most of the stories in this are pure bullshit. But bullshit can be entertaining.

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                    • Finished with several of the books I listed earlier. Richard Laymon's NIGHT SHOW was pretty derivative, but not entirely unenjoyable if expectations kept low, which I did, as it is...Richard Laymon. T. M. Wright's A MANHATTAN GHOST STORY was a mess. The screenwriter who got a $2 million advance lucked out for penning a script based on this work that was never produced, as did Sharon Stone - to the tune of $5 million - for a "pay or play" option in her contract, according to Wiki. I'm assuming they never made the film because they delayed it too long and then THE SIXTH SENSE came out. (Yep, that's what Wright's book is essentially about.)

                      I'm on YEAR'S BEST HORROR STORIES #3 now. Faves from #1 and #2 are "Prey" (Richard Matheson, of course), "Double Whammy" and "Animal Fair" (Robert Bloch, naturally), "Lucifer" (E. C. Tubb), "Problem Child" (Peter Oldale), "The Hate" (Terri E. Pinckard), "A Quiet Game" (Celia Fremlin), "The Price of a Demon" (Gary Brandner), "Haunts of the Very Rich" (T. K. Brown III; source for the made-for-TV movie starring Lloyd Bridges and Cloris Leachman), and "Like Two White Spiders" (Eddy C. Bertin; kind of a cross between Leiber's "Power of the Puppets" and Clive Barker's "The Body Politic," which probably was inspired by this tale).

                      Mixed in with all that, I've been going through some books sitting on my "to complete" shelf, basically things I started but didn't get all the way through, some going back 20 or more years. This includes a couple of volumes of another horror anthology series, THE BEST NEW HORROR. The one of those I concluded reading was volume 6. Favorite story was Robert Bloch's "The Scent of Vinegar" (yes, I'm partial toward this writer) involving Malaysian penangallans in Beverly Hills, my least favorite was Kim Newman's "Out of the Night, When the Full Moon is Bright..." (think: social justice werewolves).
                      VHS will never die!

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                      • About halfway through Die Hard- or as the cover prefers it: Nothing Lasts Forever. I'm surprised that the book tracks pretty closely with the film so far and is entertainingly written. If I have a complaint it's the hyping of the main character. I hate this stuff. The movie does so well by casting Bruce Willis as a kind of everyman who can't believe the shit he's doing and that's what makes it work. In the book the guy is a bona fide hero. He's in his 60 but he hops on a plane and immediately the young stewardessed are falling over themselves to sleep with him. He's a war hero who shot down nazi planes for giggles. Every cop who sees him nods in awed recognition knowing his achievements as a police officer. None of this rings vaguely true and creates a charaacter I really couldn't give a shit about. Still, a good, pulpy read so far.
                        "Never let the fact that they are doing it wrong stop you from doing it right." Hyman Mandell.

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                        • Originally posted by Dom D View Post
                          About halfway through Die Hard- or as the cover prefers it: Nothing Lasts Forever. I'm surprised that the book tracks pretty closely with the film so far and is entertainingly written. If I have a complaint it's the hyping of the main character. I hate this stuff. The movie does so well by casting Bruce Willis as a kind of everyman who can't believe the shit he's doing and that's what makes it work. In the book the guy is a bona fide hero. He's in his 60 but he hops on a plane and immediately the young stewardessed are falling over themselves to sleep with him. He's a war hero who shot down nazi planes for giggles. Every cop who sees him nods in awed recognition knowing his achievements as a police officer. None of this rings vaguely true and creates a charaacter I really couldn't give a shit about. Still, a good, pulpy read so far.
                          Dom, I guess you know that the book was a sequel to Roderick Thorp's earlier novel THE DETECTIVE, which was filmed with Frank Sinatra in the lead role. I believe that at one point, an adaptation of NOTHING LAST FOREVER with Sinatra in the lead role was considered: I'm not sure how far they got with that idea, but it would have been interesting nonetheless. (The other interesting thing about the novel is that the villains are out-and-out Red Brigade-style terrorists.)
                          'You know, I'd almost forgotten what your eyes looked like. Still the same. Pissholes in the snow'

                          http://www.paul-a-j-lewis.com (my photography website)
                          'All explaining in movies can be thrown out, I think': Elmore Leonard

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                          • There's just the one other book in the series is there? I was wondering vaguely if maybe it had been a long running series following him since the war.
                            "Never let the fact that they are doing it wrong stop you from doing it right." Hyman Mandell.

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                            • Pretty sure there were only the two Joe Leland books, Dom, yes.

                              Another Thorp novel worth looking out for is RAINBOW DRIVE, which was made into a pretty decent TV movie in 1990 which starred Peter Weller.
                              'You know, I'd almost forgotten what your eyes looked like. Still the same. Pissholes in the snow'

                              http://www.paul-a-j-lewis.com (my photography website)
                              'All explaining in movies can be thrown out, I think': Elmore Leonard

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                              • I just got CULT MOVIES Volumes 1-3, so I guess I'm gonna read those next.

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