One thing leads to another. In one of the recent James R. Benn novels about army investigator Billy Boyle, the protagonist picks up a copy of Nevil Shute’s 1942 novel, Pied Piper. I have half a dozen Shute paperback in my library, but I didn’t recall having read this particular book. Naturally, I had to check whether or not this one of the books in my library, and found that indeed, I owned a copy.

Who knows where I picked up the British edition, with a list price of £3.99, printed in 1992. I read the back cover, which barely hints at the story within. Told as a story within a story, Pied Piper takes place in France just before and after the German invasion of France and the British evacuation at Dunkirk. An older man, near seventy, tells a story to a younger man in a club in London, as bombs from the Germans rain down outside.

Howard, by some strange decision, traveled to France in the Spring of 1940, even as Germany and Britain were at war. Perhaps in those days, people though France was safe, while Switzerland likely would suffer the fate of Austria. Howard traveled to the Jura mountains for a fishing expedition, carrying with him a special set of poles, and wet flies. While at the hotel, he learns of the German invasion of Norway, and their advance through Holland and Belgium. He decides it’s best to head back to England. A couple, the man working for the League of Nations in Switzerland, ask him to take their young children to England, thinking the journey safer than returning to Zurich.

Howard agrees, and begins a long journey toward Dijon and Paris, eventually the coast and over to England. En route, plans change. The Germans storm into France, throwing rail service into chaos. The youngest child catches a fever; they are forced to rest along the way, picking up a 10-year-old girl whose father works in England. They switch from trains to bus. The road gets bombed by Germans, and they continue on foot, picking up another child, an orphan as a result of the bombs. In another city, an additional child joins their band. Howard gains a helper, a woman who knew his son. As Howard later learned, that woman almost became his daughter-in-law, had his son not died in an RAF bombing raid, being a pilot in the midst of the war.

Will Howard and his band of children make it to the coast, and if they get there, will they evade the Germans and reach England? As the blurb on my book cover says, “You have to read on and on.” Shute’s style is basic, but he spins a compelling tale. Some of the mores are rooted in an earlier age, but the sketches of the French and French countryside uniquely French (at least from an outsider’s perspective). It’s a tale born of tragedy—Howard’s son’s death—love, courage, kindness, and fear.

There’s rarely a book series that I’ve started from the beginning. Often I pick up a book mid-way in a series, then if I like the book, try to locate the earlier books. James R. Benn’s Billy Boyle series might be an exception, as I read the first book in the series first, then skipped some of the sequels. I’ve read six of his novels to date, some out of sequence, and some in a row. It’s a strange method, hopping from one event to the next, not paying too much attention to what went before.

All the novels do fill in parts of the back-story, at least in terms of the main character. A former Boston police officer who made detective shortly before Pearl Harbor, the titular character is related to General Eisenhower, and gets a cushy assignment to the general’s staff, or so he thinks. He’s quickly assigned as a sort of roving detective for the general, sent here and there to investigate various crimes, usually involving murders, he finds himself in many of the crucial battles or locations of WWII.

The first novel, Billy Boyle, takes place mostly in England, but also in Norway. It’s not the strongest of the ones I’ve read. Others, like Death’s Door, takes place in the Vatican and Rome, still under German occupation. A Blind Goddess deals with racism, highly prevalent in the US Army despite its waste of resources. The Rest is Silence bring attention to preparations for Normandy, and how secrecy pervades everything, even massive disasters. A Mortal Terror veers into serial killer territory, while Rag and Bone alludes to the Katyn forest massacre, and how the British alliance with the Soviets covered up this horrible crime.

I think Benn’s written more than 14 novels in this series, so clearly I have a lot more to read. If you like historical fiction, with a focus on WWII, this is one series to bite your teeth into.

I’m slowly amassing a collection of mysteries published by Soho Crime. It’s not yet at the stage where I deliberately try to complete a collection. Rather, I pick them up as I find them. Sometimes I’m force to put certain books down and walk away, instead of starting a new series by a new author before I finish existing ones.

It all started four years ago with one book by Janwillem Van de Wetering, which led to Peter Lovesey, Cara Black, Mick Herron, and countless others. There are helpful listings in the back of most of the books showing other books and authors available, and the countries or cities where the action takes place. Most are outside the US, which gives me a chance to learn about many unfamiliar places.

One such book is by Matt Rees, formerly the Jerusalem bureau chief for TIME magazine. A Grave in Gaza is not the first book in the Omar Yussef series, but it’s the one I found and read first. I admit that I know little of this area in the Middle East. What I’ve read online and in newspapers seem to indicate things change quickly, usually for the worse, with civilians always in the role of collateral damage.

Rees’ book focuses mostly on the warring factions fighting for power in Gaza, a tiny strip of land, while trying to free an innocent man. It’s a tough read, with one death I fully expected and one that I did not. I suspect places like Gaza could always be portrayed in even more brutal ways, despite the book’s already vivid descriptions of torture, betrayal, murder, and terror. I didn’t know what to expect when I learned the protagonist’s age and background, but I was thoroughly impressed by both the character and the writer.

Nearly 30 years ago I bought the paperback copy collection with some of Charles Beaumont’s short stories. Published by Tor Books, The Howling Man‘s pages now are yellowed with age, and smells of dust and decaying paper. This book originally was published in hardcover by small press, Dark Harvest, and entitled Charles Beaumont: Selected Stories. It appeared nearly 30 years after Beaumont’s untimely death at the age of 37, from early-onset Alzheimers. What a cruel fate.

Last month I happened upon the Dark Harvest book in Lawrence Person’s book catalog, and bought it along plus a couple other older books, plus a much more recently published novel, the latter by Lewis Shiner. Re-reading Beaumont’s stories, now 30 years after the original publication, is both enjoyable and depressing. It’s enjoyable because the stories are brilliantly written, but depressing because almost all the writers who wrote introductions to the stories, are now dead as well. Most of those writers knew Beaumont personally: Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson, George Clayton Johnson, Robert Bloch, William F. Nolan, Roger Corman, and more. Some of the people writing introductions are more famous than Beaumont, in large part because of Beaumont’s early death, so many years ago.

Beaumont wrote actively only for a short dozen or so years. He was a well-known writer in his lifetime, appearing in Playboy, writing teleplays for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, and writing movie scripts for Hollywood. Today, few people new to the SF field likely will have heard of him. I know of only other Beaumont book published in the past 30 years, and it appeared in 2000: A Touch of the Creature was published by Subterranean Press, limited to 1000 copies, and collected mostly unpublished and early tales. Maybe if I dig a bit on the internet I might find other books, likely equally limited to the small press if they exist.

Charles Beaumont: Selected Stories includes a lengthy introduction by editor Roger Anker, and brief note from Beaumont’s son, before leading off with a Ray Bradbury introduction to a truly eerie story, “Miss Gentibelle”. Could anyone dare to write one like this today? I think not.

There are 29 other stories in the book, 30 in all. These range from humorous to dark, science fiction to fantasy. All are tales of the imagination. Some are rooted in the mid-century, while others feel timeless.

A few years ago, a documentary was produced, called “The Short Life of Twilight Zone’s Magic Man.”

There’s also a Charles Beaumont memorial, also on YouTube.

Hopefully Beaumont won’t be forgotten. Though I see Bradbury books often in bookstores, most of the other big-name authors whose names appear in this book have long since disappeared from the publishing world, remembered only by name, found only occasionally in used bookstores. The publishing world is a cruel one: tough to break into, and quickly to forget fame.

Haruki Murakami is one of my favorite writers. Although I have all his other books (aside from one) in paperback, the size and scope of his latest novel was such that when I saw a copy in the Beyer bookstore in Bergen, Norway while visiting last summer, I had to buy the hardcover edition. Besides, the British edition’s cover looked considerably more attractive than the American edition. I’m not sure what the cashier thought when I handed over the massive Murakami book in English along with the Norwegian edition of a Jørn Lier Horst mystery novel. I guess as long as money also is handed over, I could as well have been buying anything.

My two favorite Murakami books are 1Q84 and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Both are hefty books, to the point where I bought the former in the edition with three volumes instead a fat book with a spine likely to break under the stress. Killing Commendatore is no different, being nearly 700 pages long. I was concerned the trip back across the Atlantic would damage the book, but aside from a dent in the front cover, which might have been there from the start, it made the trip and subsequent reading without too much of a beating. Besides, it not like it’s a first edition.

While waiting for the translation from the Japanese edition, I read some reviews of the novel, which was a foolish action. Reviewers (and I’ve been there), present interesting views of the books they cover. Their opinions are at a different level from “mere” readers. In this case, I wanted to approach the book as a reader, as a fan of Murakami’s style and method. I enjoy his longer books the best, as he has a way with words, with setting, pace. His writing style eases you into the book, sort of like slipping into a warm bath. I don’t read Murakami with the intent to race to the end, but rather savor every moment of the journey.

I tried to distance myself from the reviews as I read the book; not all of them were favorable. The main characters, a portrait painter betrayed by his wife, suffers a sort of breakdown. He decides to leave his life behind, sets out on an aimless journey across Japan. Eventually he settles into a situation where he house-sits for a friend, whose dead father’s house sits empty. The father, a (fictional) famous Japanese painter, looms over the narrative. By chance the protagonist is also pulled back into portrait painting, after trying to quit. He also slips into a strange sideways world, as is so often the case in Murakami’s novels. There’s also a great deal of sex, more so that in Murakami’s other novels.

While not on the same level (in my opinion) as 1Q84 or The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, this book comes close. Having caught up to all his books, I find it difficult that I now must wait until he completes his next one, and his translators complete their arduous task of turning it into English.