Monday, September 12, 2005

So Long, Long.

I read the second installment of Tabor Evans' Longarm series, Longarm on the Border and was so disappointed in it (compared to how well I liked the first book, and in comparison to the first ten or so books of Don Pendleton's Executioner series) that I decided to wait awhile before playing with the cheesy 70s pulps again.

Instead I've recently read some classics. First I read, in less than two hours, both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll. I followed that up with J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan

Then I did myself a double whammy by not only reading adult books, but reading books I had never read before. These included A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas: Slave, Willa Cather's O Pioneers! and Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy.

Last was Charlotte Gilman's lost work Herland and I've just started The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Braced with these classics I feel solid enough to say a word or two on Custis Long's second adventure. It lacked the interesting enigma which the first mystery had, the most compelling moments concern an assassination attempt in the beginning which is neither followed through nor has any relation to the rest of the story, and like the first book Longarm takes his pants off too many times to be realistic and more explicitly depicted than a fan of action-western-mysteries cares to experience. The one exception, where Long's two current fuck-buddies find out about each other and decide to combine their talents for a threesome instead of kicking him to the curb does not get the same amount of coverage as the rest.

Long didn't do much case-solving, pretty much found himself moving along due to external circumstances and convinced me not to bother with #3 anytime soon, if ever.