Paperback Rider!

Bookworm's Book Club Presents:

Dirty Harry #1: Duel for Cannons  by "Dane Hartman"  (Warner Books, 1981)  I put the author's name in quotes because like almost all "men's adventure" series books, that's a house name with more than one author writing the books. There were originally paperbacks of at least the first four Dirty Harry movies (I'm not sure about The Dead Pool), and this was a secondary series of books that came out between The Enforcer in 1976 and Sudden Impact in 1983. It ran for 12 books, not too shabby. This first book starts out near San Francisco as an old friend of Harry's is stalked and killed by a psychotic hitman wielding a .44 Magnum, just like the one carried by our Inspector Callahan. Harry chases a very obvious trail first to Los Angeles, where he gets into some misadventures on the Warner Brothers lot (that's the studio that made the Dirty Harry movies) with a couple of in-jokes to lighten up the action a bit. Then it's off to San Antonio Texas where Harry soon realizes everyone, including the police, are on the payroll of local politico H.A. Stryker, and that he'll have to stay on his toes if he wants to stay alive. He then goes on the offensive to avenge his friend's death, which is when Stryker and his men realize why he's called Dirty Harry. It ends about four times as Callahan and the hitman continually duel it out with their .44's, but no one could say "Hartman" didn't pack this one with action. All in all, not bad - the author has mostly captured Clint Eastwood's voice and mannerisms with his literary version of the filmic hero, and if you liked the movies, you'd probably enjoy this.

Star Trek-The Next Generation: Do Comets Dream?  by S.P. Somtow  (Pocket Books, 2003)  S.P. Somtow is the pen name of Somtow Sucharitkul, the rather interesting screenwriter of The Laughing Dead and Burial of the Rats. Here he tries his hand at a TNG novel, and it's a little different, to say the least. The Enterprise is off to visit a planet threatened by a comet heading right for them for the last 5000 years. The alien race feel this is a predestined "reboot" they have to go through, and that a new version of their race will spring up from the ashes of the old. So Picard and company have a big dilemna: they can save the planet, but what will that do to the alien culture, and what about the Prime Directive? Somtow starts off with the aliens, and I wasn't much hooked at first, but I hung in, and when the action switched to the Enterprise, I found myself getting more absorbed. The author really seems to have gotten Gene Roddenberry's idea for Picard and crew - that they are a very benign bunch who believe the best of others and work well together. This idea seemed to hamper the TV writers a lot, as they complained there could be no drama if the crew couldn't squabble. But Somtow pulls it off, and his scenes set on the starship are well written. (And as always, I checked: Data used no contractions that I saw). Once the Federation types start interacting with the aliens, the story takes a big turn I wasn't entirely invested in, with several characters living through a bio-organic holodeck style adventure from the aliens' past that shows them what they need to know to solve their problems in their present. But this is a chunk of the book, probably a third or so of the total page count. And it was not what I was looking for in a Star Trek story, so I "fast forwarded" (aka skimmed) quite a bit through these passages, slowing back to normal reading speed when that segment ended. All in all, worth a read for anyone looking for some new Star Trek action waiting for the next movie to come out.


Thanks for dropping by the book club, til next time, you Can Poke Me With A Fork, Cause I Am Outta Here!