White Line Fever: The Autobiography (2002)

Join the legend of rock 'n roll - Motörhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister - on an epic journey through time and space as he battles record executives, concert promoters, drug addiction, and finding enough loot to buy a second pair of trousers. It's the story of Hawkwind, Motörhead, and the glorious early days of heavy metal. Just remember, if you squeeze his lizard, he'll put his snake on you...

White Line Fever is easily one of the most hilarious books I've ever read. I must have found something to have a good belly laugh at on every other page. Lemmy's voice comes through even with a ghost writer helping him along and his sense of humor in this book is warped, self-depreciating, and Python-esque all at once. Our man Lem probably could have made it as a comedian if the whole rock 'n roll thing didn't pan out for him.

If you're a fan of Motörhead or rock/metal in general I would say this book has to be essential reading. Despite all the drugs he consumed and the whirlwind touring schedule for his band, Lemmy had a solid memory and he has all manner of insightful stories to tell about the scene going all the way back to the 1950's up until the new millennium. Readers will also learn about Lemmy's blind hatred of the song "Ace of Spades" (mentioned several times throughout the book), his rather unique obsession with astrological signs, he and his son trading girlfriends (also brought up in his biopic film), the trials of touring in eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall, his vendetta against the old "CD box" from the late 80's/early 90's (remember those?), and even what old arcade game or pinball machine he was playing on during a particular touring or recording cycle. I think many a Motörhead fan figured out over time that Lemmy was big into gaming, but as a gamer nerd myself it's pretty cool to hear Lemmy prattle on about his addition to the original DOOM on PC back in the day.

Like a number of musicians, Lemmy is sometimes way too harsh a critic of his own material and tends to slag off some of Motörhead's records. I think the album Rock 'N Roll is great, for instance, but Lemmy claims he and the rest of the band did a poor job in the recording process and doesn't seem to like it at all. To be fair, Lemmy also laments the band's issues with record producers not always capturing the Motörhead sound at its best, and that's something I'd agree with him on; Motörhead never had a mainstay producer like a Martin Burch with Iron Maiden who properly understood what the band was about. It's fairly simple to break down in retrospect, but at the time a blues band masquerading as the loudest rock band on the planet probably didn't make sense to a lot of record producers.

The only shame about White Line Fever is that the book ends in the early 2000's and there's much more to the Lemmy Kilmister story before his passing, including more side projects, his battle with diabetes, essentially becoming a member of the rock 'n roll aristocracy, and even a flirtation with the pro wrestling business. There exists an 'updated' version of this book that includes an extension that discusses the last decade of his life (complete with an introduction by the worst drummer in the world - Lars Ulrich), but it's evident this section is the obligatory posthumous addendum to try and sell a few more copies.

I did find it quite fascinating how prescient Lemmy was about the direction the world was going by the time of the early 2000's, especially at the book's coda. Observant and well-read fellow that he was, Lemmy noticed changes in both the baby boomer and the gen-x crowds and how they were raising their children and seems to predict the western world becoming a far less tolerant place. Twenty-odd years later and we're mired in woke cancel culture and collectivism - intolerance insidiously disguised as tolerance - trying to destroy any and all joy in the universe.

Thankfully, we still have Motörhead's freewheeling rock and roll discography, a force far stronger than anything the current state of the world can throw at us.

Farewell, My Lovely (1940)

After a client is killed on his watch, Los Angeles-based private detective Philip Marlowe finds himself embroiled in another puzzle box of a case involving jewel thieves, a corrupt fortune teller, some crooked cops, a gambling ring evading the local law, and a not-so-gentle giant hoodlum on the prowl for his treacherous ex-girlfriend. Grab your cigarette case and the nearest carafe of black coffee, gumshoes, because we're about to get more concussions than a 1980's pro wrestler!

Murder, My Sweet starring Dick Powell as Phillip Marlowe is quite possibly my favorite film noir and after re-watching recently it occurred to me that the novel it was based on - Farewell, My Lovely - was one of the few Raymond Chandler pieces I hadn't got around to reading yet. I corrected this heinous oversight as quickly as possible and found myself once again sucked into the lights and shadows of Chandler's vision of the West Coast with Phillip Marlowe - perpetual smartass and would-be knight in shining armor - as my tour guide.

Those steeped in crime novel lore are likely already aware that Chandler often cobbled his Marlowe novels together by stitching previously written short stories into a singular narrative, but truthfully, the sometimes abrupt changes of pace and plot trajectory in Farewell, My Lovely might give away this trick to even a neophyte reader. I personally don't have a problem with this, but I concede this factor could be bothersome to some, especially keen mystery and whodunnit fans looking for a neat and comprehensive wrap-up by the end of the novel. In bringing different stories together as one, Chandler sometimes inadvertently creates plot holes, drops characters for long stretches of time with no apparent explanation, or introduces what should be an important character extremely late in the narrative.

However, the loose strands of plot surrounding the confounding mysteries Chandler presents never appeared to be of any major concern to the author. His primary objective was drenching the reader in atmosphere, and Farewell, My Lovely, much like its immediate predecessor The Big Sleep, is awash in a delightfully blackened ambiance from the sinful streets of Los Angeles to the broken and disaffected cast of characters each with a stain or three upon their souls. In the middle of it all is Marlowe, a man who should be broken in more ways than one but always finds a way to persevere through the mire and pursue justice... even if no one else appears to be interested in pursuing it.

There are moments of purple prose that wonderfully exemplify the pulp style, where Chandler goes out of his way to describe scenes in lavish detail to really transport the reader into the room. These are the moments where the reader can tell how much Chandler was in love with language, but there are just as many instances where instead of belaboring the point, Chandler's quick wit comes through like a blunt weapon over the head:

"I used my knee on his face. It hurt my knee. He didn’t tell me whether it hurt his face."

Finally, I'll leave you with this: a fun Farewell, My Lovely drinking game. Point your browser to a completely cucked and compromised den of leftist gobbledygook like Goodreads and take a shot every time you scroll past a contemporary review of this novel where the reviewer clutches their pearls and nearly faints at Raymond Chandler's use of colorful language. Congratulations. You're now as much of an alcoholic as Philip Marlowe appears to be. It's no secret that Chandler, much like his pal Ian Fleming, wrote novels that are no longer suitable for mOdErN aUdIeNcEs, which is why you'd be best served picking up an older edition of this book if you're ever interested in reading it, because a master of prose like Chandler deserves to be read free of censorship or abominably tedious "content warning" invasions prefacing his work like bad graffiti.

Greyhawk Adventures: Saga of Old City (1985)

The rapscallion known as Gord levels up his abilities as a thief during a series of quite random adventures across the lands of Oerth. Treasure. Betrayal. Mystery. Dexterity checks. Grab a can of Dr. Thunder and your dice bag, it's time to nerd out with another D&D novel, baby!

Despite being a massive geek for Dungeons & Dragons since around the age of seven and reading and then re-reading the original Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master Guide innumerable times, I'd never actually read a novel penned by Gary Gygax himself. I sought to rectify that by reaching for Saga of Old City, the first in a series of books featuring Gygax's own creation... Gord. Yes, Gord. Doesn't exactly have the same ring as a 'Conan' or 'Gray Mouser', but Gord is clearly Gygax's own attempt at creating an enduring fantasy pulp protagonist. Unfortunately, I don't think the esteemed godfather of D&D is able to stick the landing - at least not in this first offering.

The problems are evident right from the outset. The novel doesn't exactly open with anything grandiose or epic to get readers in the mood for dashing adventures. Instead, we're treated to our 'hero' being bullied and literally pissing himself in front of the other juveniles picking on him. Of course, Gord escapes and lives to fight another day, but doesn't exactly grow to be that much bigger in the intervening years that quickly pass by. I do find it slightly hilarious that instead of a muscle-bound hunk or a Merlin-esque wizard, Gygax went with a rascally manlet as his creation that would somehow make a stamp on the sword and sorcery genre.

Gord is framed as an underdog character we're meant to root for, but he's not exactly a Robin Hood type thief with a just cause that readers could easily rally behind, nor does he possess the unlimited vaults of charisma necessary to be a heel you can cheer for. Instead, Gord is a selfish jerk with a prevailing sense of avarice who participates in murders at various points in this novel and acts like a complete clown around women. Such was my disdain for Gord, I found myself actively rooting for his adversaries to kick his ass all over the pages of this book.

The other serious problem Saga of Old City suffers from is its structure. There is essentially no standard plot to this story other than 'Gord goes on a series of adventures'. This is written as a novel with standard chapter breaks, but it's really a collection of short stories cobbled together under the guise of a full-length novel. I don't have a problem with short stories, but the way Gygax has handled this is almost like a D&D campaign. You can clearly see where one adventure ends and another one abruptly begins, whisking Gord off in a completely different direction and ignoring any character development that may have occurred beforehand. A reader already attuned to tabletop role-playing games can also spot where Gord appears to 'level up', as his abilities and talents become more pronounced.

What does work here is Gygax's love for language and the flourishes of purple prose he employs from time to time, which fits in rather nicely for a pulp tale. Any author who can plausibly work the word 'lugubrious' into a sentence and still have it flow is a-okay in my book.

Still, I found Saga of Old City an absolute chore to finish, and I'm not exactly eager to take another trip with Gord on his adventures any time soon...

El Borak and Other Desert Adventures (1934 - 1936; compilation 2010)

Before Conan, before Solomon Kane, there was Francis Xavier Gordon, otherwise known as "El Borak". Equally adept with the gun as he is the sword, Robert E. Howard's ass kicking Texan soldier of fortune battles ruthless Turk bandits, surly Afghan chieftains, and wily Russian despots across all corners of the Middle East. It's the kind of fiction that'll put hair on a man's chest, by God!

Full disclosure here: this review is likely going to be pure gushing rather than any kind of nuanced look at a particular book. The reason for this is simple: Robert E. Howard is one of my favorite writers and El Borak is my favorite of his characters - and that's saying something coming from a Conan superfan.

This Del Rey collection features all of the El Borak stories Howard dreamed up in the mid 1930's. As such, for brevity's sake I'm reviewing the entire collection as a whole rather than focusing on each individual story here.

I was initially attracted to the El Borak stories thanks to the promise of western style action in a completely different setting - the "eastern" as some have called it. Although the stories take place half a world away from the Old West, it's fair to say they have all of the same visceral, elemental aspects of a great western story: from the man versus nature survival segments to the blood and thunder of cacophonous battles to the hero who was once renowned as a gunfighter back home, it's all here.

Moreover, it is simply remarkable how well the reader can envision the mountains, gorges, and baking desert plains of the Middle Eastern setting given the fact that Robert E. Howard never ventured anywhere near that part of the world during his lifetime. Howard conjured his Middle East from nothing more than guidebooks he acquired for his personal library. His other characters may have gained more mainstream popularity over the years, but Howard's El Borak tales are the true heavyweights of his writing career, giving the reader a glimpse at some of the very best writing the Texan author was capable of producing.

If I had to pick one of the short stories as a favorite it might be "The Lost Valley of Iskander", which sees Gordon stumbling upon a lost city of Greeks living in a secluded part of Afghanistan. It's arguably the closest any of these particular stories gets to the fantastical, but it features a nice mélange of mystery and survival alongside a grandiose final battle. Howard even works some of his beloved boxing pastime into this story when Gordon has to compete in a meaty bare knuckle brawl with the giant leader of the Greeks for macho supremacy.

This particular compilation uses artwork from Tim Bradstreet with actor Thomas Jane modeling as El Borak. The artwork is a fantastic addition to these stories and makes me pine for an El Borak movie starring Tom Jane we never got to see...

I would be remiss in pointing out that this particular compilation also features stories with two other American adventurers: Kirby O'Donnell and Steve Clarney. While these stories are just as enthralling as the El Borak oeuvre, Howard simply didn't write enough of them in his lifetime for these characters to get their own volumes, so the publishers have (wisely, in my opinion) included them alongside Gordon's adventures. Despite sharing a similar premise of an American in the far east searching for treasure or adventure, both O'Donnell and Clarney have their own personalities. Clarney in particular seems to have more of a wiseass style that readers didn't often see in Howard protagonists. Don't sleep on these stories just because Gordon is out of the picture, they're still fun reads.

Doctor Who: Dancing the Code (1995)

The Doctor and Jo, along with some of the UNIT regulars, a terrorist, and an annoying journalist (is there any other kind?) are drawn into the clutches of a civil war in a north African hellhole, but this is no ordinary war, kids! Instead of standard munitions, chemical warfare, or playing Nickelback records on full-blast until their enemy's ears bleed, one side has decided to utilize GIANT ALIEN BUGS long burrowed into the planet. Is this Doctor Who meets Starship Troopers, or is this a more Lovecraftian take on 'be careful what the hell you wake up from deep slumbers'? Only YOU can decide! Reverse the polarity!

Long before the wankery and wokery of the revived skinwalker series of Doctor Who starting in 2005, there were the "wilderness years" - the now-halcyon period of time after the series had gone into semi-permanent hiatus starting in 1989. From this quasi-cancellation sprung a number of creative outlets in which to give fans new Who adventures: comics, audio dramas, direct-to-VHS atrocities, PC games, and of course, original novels. The first several years of novels were published by Virgin Books, which gave us both 'The New Adventures', which starred the then-current seventh incarnation of the Doctor, and 'The Missing Adventures', which featured stories about past Doctors wedged into any convenient gap the author could find between television episodes.

As great as it was for a young fan such as myself to receive new content based on the series while it was off-the-air, one of the recurring bugbears of the Virgin era of Who novels was their insistence on cramming in edgelord content that seemed woefully out of step with the spirit of Doctor Who. There's been many a treatise on why this happened across all corners of Who fandom over the years, so I won't tread old ground in this individual review, suffice it to say when I was a kid entering that brooding age of adolescence I found some of the edgy Doctor Who novels to be wicked fun, but as a more mature adult with a deeper appreciation and understanding of the classic series I find the novels that take forays into the grimdark to be misguided at best, tedious at worst.

But this is already a very long introduction to get us to tonight's feature presentation: Dancing the Code by Paul Leonard, one from the Missing Adventures series featuring the Third Doctor and his assistant Jo Grant. It's a novel that I want to love because it has a genuinely interesting and different take on the usual alien invasion plots that were quite commonplace during the Third Doctor's reign. The story also gives us a vastly different setting in the north African desert than we could ever hope to see in the same heavily budgeted television series as it was in the early 1970's, in addition to action set pieces that I'm sure any fan of the Third Doctor would love to see. (The Doctor piloting a jet? Sign me up.) The author also provides characters from UNIT, such as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and Captain Mike Yates, some actual soldiering to do instead of relegating them to third wheel butt-monkeys as is so often the case in later-era UNIT stories.

Unfortunately, Dancing the Code is dragged down by the aforementioned creep of edginess that blighted so much of Who's Virgin years. This novel is, in a word, gory. Not that I have a problem with the bloody or grotesque crossing over into science-fiction, but it was always handled delicately in Doctor Who, primarily because it was still considered a family show. There were frightening things shown on the screen from time to time, but there was always a line and the producers, directors, and designers of classic Who never crossed it. Dancing the Code on the other hand has bucketloads of random NPC's getting brutally murdered at every turn. Paul Leonard seems to gleefully flaunt the Virgin-era trope of attempting to shock the reader by introducing a completely superfluous character to us and giving the reader just a tiny bit of insight into their life before something suddenly jumps out at them and rips them apart a page or two later, complete with the hackneyed "the last thought through his head was..." line that never seems to hit home because we simply don't care about these characters. But then there's also really gnarly and joyless things like Jo having to watch a little girl in a desert camp die after a bombing because part of a bicycle lodged through her chest, or doomed characters essentially melting into stinking goo in front of others.

Again, there's a time and place for mature, boundary pushing, revolting R-rated stuff, but I don't believe Doctor Who is the proper venue for it at all.

There was definitely some good that came out of the Virgin Missing Adventures, but Dancing the Code is one you can safely skip.