Depopulating My Library, Part III: Len Deighton, Robert Heinlein, and maybe Adam Hall

I guess I started reading spy novels in high school when I grabbed any James Bond book that showed up in the row of paperback books sold at Knupp’s Drug Store in Larned, KS (yes, complete with cherry cokes at the fountain). The only Ian Fleming work I still have is his best Bond book and the best movie From Russia with Love. I might as well keep it.

My favorite spy author is John LeCarre and I have all but his most recent work. The writing is superb, the tales captivating and what wonderful movies were and are being made from them. I have 13 hardback copies (including a First Edition American one of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold complete with book jacket in nice condition that I got for $3) and 9 paperback copies, some of which replicate the hardback edition. Rereading them is like putting on a comfortable sweater. Not that his prose is easy, but it’s so fluid and it ages well, like wine. No doubt I’ll go back and take sips.

I also liked Len Deighton and have all his works. I’ve reread them a couple of times and very much admire his plotting and character developments. His tryptich of trilogies about the English spy Bernard Samson in Berlin were captivating. Ian Holm played that spy in a 1988 Granada Television excellent adaptation of the first trilogy, entitled Game, Set and Match, transmitted as twelve 60 minute episodes. I don’t know if they can be found these days because Deighton got into something of snit about them. Anyway, I’m not going to revisit his works. They are now in the hands of Wise Blood, a soon to open used bookstore here in KC's Westport.

Adam Hall’s Quiller series and John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series present something of mystery to me. There were several times in my life when I was just down. I won’t call it a depression, but certainly a blue period complete with anxiety about my life, what I was doing, and what would happen to me.

I often turned to reread the Quiller or the MacDonald books, loving to do so in the order they were published. Why? Well, they’re good action reads and that takes you out of yourself. With Travis McGee it wasn’t so much the story as the character. You just wanted to be around Travis again. Adam Hall, the pen name Elleston Trevor adopted for the Quiller books, really knew how to do action. He knew when to stop a scene at its most dramatic and keep you on the seat of your chair. They are page turners, but I don’t need to turn those pages anymore. So Deighton is now gone and Hall may follow. I’m still undecided. I’ll keep my Travis McGee books. I might want to have a drink with him again (he turned me on to Boodles gin). These are books I’d more wish to give to a friend.

Which is what I did with my Robert Heinlein paperback collection. (Heinlein fans, if you haven’t read is The Door into Summer, I highly recommend it. Great use of time travel and looking at the book cover reminded me that in this 1957 book he uses a piece of equipment that won’t be invented for decades, the Cad Cam.) A new bartender at  Chez Charlie’s, my Midtown watering hole in KC that I’ve been patronizing for more than 30 years, has become a reader of my fiction and likes sci-fi, so I plopped my Heinlein collection on the bar top, said they were hers, and ordered a Bombay Sapphire and tonic (they don’t carry Boodles).

In any of these musings of mine make your curious about my own smorgasbord of fiction genres, visit the buffet here.

Are You a Kindle Unlimited Subscriber?

Kindle offers for $9.99 free access to hundreds of thousands of books. Thought I would list the works I have enrolled in that program:

Novel: Then and Now: The Harmony of the Instantaneous All Set in Lawrence, KS and The University of Kansas during that turbulent spring of 1970

Novel: The 41st Sermon Episcopal priest at mid-life and mid-faith crisis gets involved with beautiful blonde parishioner and her phony kidnap plot

Sci-fi short story By Pain Possessed Can the weakest human save us all?

Short story about a solo round of golf: Downswing



Sci fi novella: A Match Made in Heaven The Mormons leave Earth to populate the Planet Moroni and discover their destiny among the stars and themselves

Literary novella: One More Victim Because the Holocaust is a critical element in this three-part story, it has broken through the top 100 in world literature>Jewish

Collection of shorts: Hospital Days 14-year-old boy learns some life lessons working as a candy striper in a small town hospital

Short story. The Richard Dary Weight Loss Institute The best weight loss program is the one you can't remember

My five-foot shelf of Philip K. Dick

I didn't think I'd start out doing a series of blog posts about writers I admired and influenced me, but the one on John D. MacDonald was popular, so I thought I'd do one about Philip K. Dick.

To be honest, I was looking for ways to promote 3 Very Quirky Tales and I always search for Philip K. Dick (PKD) sites because the first tale in my trilogy, Tell Us Everything is a sci-fi work in which I really tried to channel PKD.

One of the many things I admired about his writing is how quickly he could set a scene and grab the reader and not let go. I hope all three stories in Quirky (also on Smashwords) might grab you.

I encountered PKD in high school. That was in Larned, KS. Our access to books was the small library and then Knupp's Drug Store (yep, with a counter, cherry cokes and all that) that had a magazine sales rack and above the magazines a shelf for paperback books. I knew the day the salesman stopped by to bring in new books, so Wednesdays after school it was stop at Knupp's, get that cherry coke, and look at the new titles.

I was drawn to science fiction. I think the first PKD I read was Solar Lottery. It amazes me that I still have the first edition ace paperback, which cost 50c. We're talking a lot of moving around here and storing books while I was in Italy and Japan. We're talking about 50 years here.

PKD showed me that a writer could completely immerse a reader in word-created reality. And what a reality he created. It was a reality that made you question reality. I didn't read his books. I absorbed them.

There are many works out there discussing his books and his craft and his tortured brain. I could add nothing except this acknowledgement:

I have a bookcase of six shelves I built in my small den. Not enough room for all my books. Which ones to put there? I was reminded of Harold Bloom's, The Western Canon. This book has been viewed by some as a sort of list for literary elite snobs or his view of the most influential books. What I understood Bloom to be saying is because of the books he lists, we are the way we are today.

So that's how I looked at the books in my library. Which ones made me the way I am today? So on those shelves is the Travis McGee series by John D. MacDonald and one five-foot shelf is all PKD. And I turned on my son and so we both still collect, although rarely will you find the old paperbacks in any used bookstore. He's caught on. Also on those shelves is the Fu Manchu series by Sax Rohmer, the works of John Le Carre, Eric Remarque, and more (am I committing to a blog post about each? We'll see).

A Philip K. Dick festival is planned for this fall in San Francisco. Details here.