Squeeze Play - Paul Benjamin

A novel that I read only because I was curious to read something by Paul Auster when he was writing under his pen name. After all, I loved Smoke and in it William Hurt's character is Paul Benjamin. On top of that, with time I have grown to like Auster's obsession with baseball. 

I had pretty low expectations of this book, and I'm pleased to see those low expectations were met. A quick enough read. An easy enough read. 

Nothing much beyond that. As far as noirs are concerned, this feels a bit out sync with the canon because it was published in the 1980s, but it's probably of a quality similar to that of hundreds of other novels of the same genres that have been forgotten with time (and if this one is still published somewhere, it's only because Paul Benjamin was Paul Auster). 

The Long Goodbye - Raymond Chandler

In all honesty I was biased against this novel before even starting it: after reading quite a lot of Chandler, I had had enough of him and with how cool Marlowe finds himself, but I did like the movie (though many didn't!) and needed something reasonably long and reasonably light to carry with me to the hospital as my wife delivered baby numero dos. Yes, because that happened too...

Unsurprisingly, I didn't particularly like the book, but the setting remains one that I enjoy (though I'd pick an LA novel by Ellroy any day over this one!). The biggest surprises were in the differences with the movie, but I never really got into the plot, and that's partly due to the little time that I have for Marlowe and to the fact that I was quite on the sleep-deprived side of things those days!
 

All in all, though, it was oddly enough the perfect read for uncomfortable nights on uncomfortable hospital chairs!

Perfidia – James Ellroy

It’s been a month and two days since my last post, so let’s get back to my commentaries (I would love to be able to call them reviews, but I’m aware they’re just three paragraphs on my impressions of books!). Perfidia was a novel I quite literally dove into after reading a falling madly in love with L.A. Confidential. Probably owing to its size and bright red cover, my daughter tried to snatch it every time I opened it. She loved it a lot. Me, less so.

Being Ellroy, it’s obviously superbly written, fast-paced, witty, intriguing, intricate and all that. In addition, the exploration of the fictionalized shady dealings in the organization of internment camps for people of Japanese origins set-up in the US at the start of WWII is absolutely fascinating.

But there is a but: while I absolutely loved how Bernstein, Lana Turner, and plenty of other celebrities of the time (or their look-alikes!) appeared in L.A. Confidential and The Black Dhalia, I think that Ellroy goes too far with Bette Davis in Perfidia. An epic one-night stand with Dud Smith, sure, but making her such a focal point of the plot was just a bit excessive. And even in this case, I’m not quite sure how I feel about Ellroy re-using yet again so many of his characters: they remain awesome, but I found myself no longer as interested in their lives as I was in other books in which they appeared.