Where Su Lin Gets Sidelined

The Paper Bark Tree Mystery by Ovidia Yu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I liked some things about this book. I liked the main character, Su Lin, who is a mix of capable and vulnerable, who is quite kind but sort of okay with her mafioso-type family, who is well-behaved as well as fairly daring. I like the setting, which is Singapore during the years between the two world wars. I know very little about modern Singapore and nothing at all about it historically, so everything here was an education. And I support the rhetorical goals found in the themes of anti-colonialism and anti-empire, with Singapore trapped under British rule, like India, and in danger of Japanese expansion in the years to come. All good.

As a mystery, it's a snooze. What a drag. Nothing happens. The action is slow and not terribly entertaining, with most of the real action taking place offscreen. And Su Lin is not an effective investigator. She might as well have been a leaf on the wind describing what she saw for all she impacted the story (until the very last scene). I understand that in that time, given her demographics, she has little real agency--but what agency she does have she barely uses to solve this mystery. I blame the author for not giving her more interesting things to do, better clues to find, more secrets to pierce by her own efforts and her own logic. You expect a mystery novel to have a POV character who tries to solve the mystery, and yeah, she does some of that, but her sleuthing is so slight and produces so little new information she might not have bothered. Most of what she knows is stuff other people just tell her. The last 30 pages are pretty good, and there's some genuine action there, but that barely makes up for almost 300 pages of slow motion. IMO. I almost DNF'ed many times.

People generally love the novel, which I don't understand, but that's cool. I liked it some, as I explain above, but not enough to read another. We clearly are looking for different things when we read mysteries. Maybe this is meant to lean literary. Anyway, not my thing. YMMV

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Where I Read All the Pages

The Mystery on the Snow by Kenneth Robeson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was unique (among the Doc Savage books I've read) in that it's a straightforward mystery without any trappings of the supernatural. There is no pretense of there being a werewolf or goblin or any of the other strange things that always turn out to have a natural explanation. Here, it's just a bad guy trying to steal a man's valuable mineral discovery.

It's otherwise pretty typical: somewhat entertaining; decent action; a bit of insensitivity and outdated language; an almost complete lack of female characters; everyday banter; a little gee-whiz science.

I liked that this one had all five of Doc's team, which makes it more fun, though I STILL cannot remember the difference between a couple of them. (In my head, Long Tom and Johnny are just Long Johnny.) :)

Recommended? Kinda. If you read Doc Savage, sure, read this one. If you don't read Doc Savage, there's no reason to start here.

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Not a review; more of a rumination, really...

Meteor Menace by Kenneth Robeson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A friend's older brother loved Doc Savage and loaned me a couple. That's how I was introduced to the series. I loved the covers from the start, but never really got into the stories. I tried, though. They seemed dated, back in the 70s, being about 40 years old at that point. Now they're twice as old, but somehow don't seem any more out of date. Not sure why I think that...

Every once in awhile I read another one. They're always kind of interesting, sometimes for the action, sometimes for the exotic settings, but more often because of a sense of nostalgia that hangs around the characters and the books themselves. There is also the amusement of seeing quaint science--radio-controlled airplanes and the like--treated like wonders. It's a window into 1930s imagination, and that has its rewards.

You can't expect too much from such novels. The plotting is almost always linear, with surprises that seldom surprise. Most of the time, the author(s) told the stories and recounted the action in the most straightforward way. Sometimes, the language rises above serviceable to quite nice, actually. Here is a somewhat overwritten (in the best way, as action stories should be) description of the titular blue meteor:

"It came up awfully out of the east. It might have been a thing spawned by the Andean mountain fastnesses. Only the faintest of ultramarine flushes marked its first appearance. But the balefire brightened with appalling swiftness, and there became audible the tiniest of whistling noises, which might have been the note of some distant, harpy piper. The sibilant note loudened."

I like passages like that, written in an Indiana Jones action adventure kind of way.

That's about as good as it gets, though. For a pulp novel, that's got to be enough.

This novel, like the rest, is meant to be a quick read, coming in at only about 40,000 words (since it was originally published in a magazine), but it's not exactly low-brow; the audience is men, mostly, the nerds of an earlier era, those who like adventure novels but are also interested in engines and electrical devices and Popular Mechanics-type technology. That's a near-miss for me; I'm not quite the right kind of nerd for that. That's why I still read a Doc Savage novel every couple of years and like it just enough to keep a few on my shelf and figure I'll maybe read another a couple years from now. (Some of the comics are, IMO, very entertaining. Maybe a better medium for Doc Savage stories, though I don't want to start any fights.)

Every lover of genre fiction--science fiction, fantasy, adventure--should read one or two of these popular pulp novels. Give it shot, just for grins. If you like it, you'll be glad to find there are about 180 other titles, and you can find lots of them on eBay real cheap. :)

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