DRAGON TEETH - Book review

Michael Crichton’s novel Dragon Teeth was published in 2017, nine years after his death. There’s no indication as to whether the completed work was entirely by him or someone else contributed or finished it. 

It’s based on much historical fact. In 1875 eighteen-year-old William Johnson made a bet with a college friend to join the archaeological expedition of Professor O.C. Marsh in his quest for dinosaur bones. This was then considered a dubious endeavour at the time: ‘many prominent ministers and theologians explicitly denounced ungodly paleontological research’ (p28). Marsh was quite a character and ‘was a good friend of Red Cloud’ (p41). Inexplicably, Marsh abandoned Johnson in Cheyenne. Johnson then teams up with Marsh’s competitor, E.D. Cope and his team, among them a chap called George Morton. They head further west, into the Badlands and the Black Hills.

Johnson’s peregrinations are shown on a helpful map at the front. He encounters a number of famous characters, among them Wyatt Earp and Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as hostile Sioux who have recently sent General Custer to the Happy Hunting Ground.

Interspersed throughout the narrative are extracts from the journals of Marsh, Cope and Johnson.

While most of the characters are based on real people, Johnson is fictitious. The final third of the book is the most interesting, being almost entirely pure fiction, whereas the first two thirds seem slow as the story tends to stick to real events (though condensed from a number of years of historical reports).  This is not the only book about the fascinating ‘Bone Wars’ between Cope and Marsh which took place over a period of ten years. There are four pages of bibliography – books that Crichton consulted to get the flavour of the individuals, the period and the historic events leading up to the unearthing of Brontosaurus teeth – dragon teeth.

Writers are urged to ‘show’ not ‘tell’. Most of this book is ‘tell’ all the way, with authorial interjections about scientific theories, without any attempt to let the characters learn themselves.

An interesting treatment of the period. A quick read. 

ERUPTION - Book review

Michael Crichton and James Patterson’s Eruption was published in 2024. Crichton died in 2008 and left an unfinished manuscript plus many notes and research details which the ubiquitous Patterson completed and shaped into this novel. 

After a prologue set in Hawaii in 2016, we move to the near-future, April 2025. All the signs are that an enormous eruption of the volcano Mauna Loa is imminent, within a week! ‘If you measure Mauna Loa from its base on the ocean floor, it is almost six miles high – more than three miles underwater, two and a half miles above... largest geographical feature on this planet’ (p69). Its 1994 eruption produced enough lava to bury Manhattan to a depth of 30ft.

John (Mac) MacGregor was a geologist who headed the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. He has a dedicated team who help monitor the area. There is a second slightly smaller volcano called Mauna Kea that dominates the nearby US Military Reserve. Mac’s main concern is the safety of the major town, Hilo that potentially could be in the path of any eruption’s lava-flow or pyroclastic cloud. Then he learns some staggering information that threatens not only the island but the world if the eruption is not diverted.

Patterson’s tendency to use short chapters ramps up the tension and keeps the pages turning. Inevitably, there’s a lot of technical stuff, but it works. We also get to learn how many lives volcanoes have claimed over the years – not only those people caught in the eruptions, but those studying and investigating the natural phenomena. There’s a helpful map of the Hawaiian islands and 109 chapters.

It’s a blast.

PS: There's a US officer in the story called Morton. Fancy that...

Glen Orbik - R.I.P.

Readers of Hard Case Crime will be familiar with the artist Glen Orbik. His output was outstanding, much of it harking back to the old pulp and noir covers of yesteryear. He died on 11 May, aged 52, too young to go. 

You can appreciate his work at his website here

http://www.orbikart.com/gallery/

My thanks to Paul Bishop for drawing my attention to this ‘In Memoriam’ article which features twenty covers by Orbik plus links to his artwork:

http://www.heavymetal.com/news/in-memoriam-20-paintings-by-glen-orbik-modern-master-of-pulp-cover-art/

Here are some of his book covers I’ve scanned from my library:

 

Friday's forgotten book

Yes, I forgot... Yesterday, I was so busy with the launch party and whatnot for Spanish Eye that there seemed no time to post the weekly FFB. Sorry about that.

Yesterday, I did receive paperback copies of books that had been hitherto forgotten, postfree courtesy of the book depository: The Venom Business, Drug of Choice and Binary all by Michael Crichton, writing as John Lange.

All eight books are now available. See my blog about all eight titles here.

The admirable Michael Crichton’s writing teeth

Long before he wrote Jurassic Park, before he created the ground-breaking TV series ER, Michael Crichton was an honours student at Harvard Medical School – and wrote paperback suspense novels on the side, under the top-secret pen name “John Lange.” In effect, Crichton cut his writing teeth on these works, and you can already detect the familiar hallmark Crichton mix of crime and science in these early titles.

Lange wrote eight books between 1966 and 1972… and then vanished. The books became unavailable for decades; pulp collectors would sometimes pay hundreds of dollars for used copies. [His breakout novel was The Andromeda Strain under his own name (1969); then followed The Terminal Man (72), The Great Train Robbery (75), Eaters of the Dead (76), Congo (80), Sphere (87) and Jurassic Park (90) and so on; he became one of those authors whose every book seemed to be turned into a movie.]

Then, forty years after “John Lange” was conceived, Michael Crichton chose Hard Case Crime to bring him back, personally re-editing two of the Lange books, even writing new chapters for one of them (Zero Cool) – all still under the cloak of the Lange identity. This project was interrupted by the author’s unexpected death from cancer in 2008, just months after the second revived Lange novel hit bookstores.

Now Hard Case Crime announces it will bring all of John Lange’s work back into print for the first time in decades – and the first time ever under the Michael Crichton name. Due for release this month (October 2013), featuring gorgeous painted cover art by Gregory Manchess and Glen Orbik, the eight John Lange novels are:

Odds On (1966): The perfect heist, planned by computer, in a luxury hotel off the coast of Spain.

Scratch One (1967): On the French Riviera, a case of mistaken identity could cost an American lawyer his life when a group of international assassins confuse him for the secret agent sent to take them down.

 

Easy Go (1968): Can an Egyptologist and his band of thieves find a lost tomb buried for centuries in the desert – and get away with its treasure?

 

Zero Cool (1969): An American doctor vacationing in Europe gets caught between rival criminal gangs who both demand his help to find a legendary gem. [Note the paperback the lady's reading - it's Grave Descend, see below...]

 

 

The Venom Business (1970): An expert on venomous snakes and smuggler of rare artefacts accepts an assignment working as a bodyguard to a man everyone wants dead.

 

Drug of Choice (1970): Bio-engineers at a secret island resort promise pleasures beyond imagination – but what’s the secret behind the strange drug they’ve created?

 

Grave Descend (1970): A diver in Jamaica, hired to search the wreck of a sunken yacht, uncovers secrets deeper and darker than the waters in which the ship rests.

Binary (1972): A terrorist mastermind and a federal agent wage a battle of wits and of nerve when the villain plots to unleash poison gas on San Diego, killing a million people… including the President of the United States.

 

“Michael was one of the most imaginative and talented suspense writers who ever lived,” said Hard Case Crime founder and editor Charles Ardai, who worked closely with Crichton on editing the Lange books. “These early novels show his ingenuity and creativity at full blast and they read like a rocket. I defy anyone who picks up one of these books to put it down unfinished.”

The books are also being offered in e-book editions (without the Manchess and Orbik cover art) by Open Road Integrated Media.

 
About Hard Case Crime
Hard Case Crime has been nominated for or won numerous honours since its inception in 2004, including the Edgar, the Shamus, the Anthony, the Barry, and the Spinetingler Award. Big author names such as Stephen King, Lawrence Block, Donald E. Westlake, Arthur Conan Doyle, Harlan Ellison, James M. Cain, Ken Bruen, John Farris, Robert Silverberg, Robert Bloch, Cornell Woolrich, David Gaddis, Alan Guthrie, and David Dodge rub shoulders with new authors in the ever-growing Hard Case Crime line-up. The series’ books have been adapted for television and film, with two features currently in development at Universal Pictures, a TV pilot based on Max Allan Collins’ Quarry novels in production for Cinemax, and the TV series Haven going into its fourth season this fall on SyFy. Hard Case Crime is published through a collaboration between Winterfall LLC and Titan Publishing Group. http://www.hardcasecrime.com

About Titan Publishing Group

Titan Publishing Group is an independently owned publishing company, established in 1981, comprising three divisions: Titan Books, Titan Magazines/Comics and Titan Merchandise. Titan Books, nominated as Independent Publisher of the Year 2011, has a rapidly growing fiction list encompassing original fiction and reissues, primarily in the areas of science fiction, fantasy, horror, steampunk and crime. Recent crime and thriller acquisitions include Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins’ all-new Mike Hammer novels, the Matt Helm series by Donald Hamilton, and the entire backlist of the Queen of Spy Writers, Helen MacInnes. Titan Books also has an extensive line of media- and pop culture-related non-fiction, graphic novels, and art and music books. The company is based at offices in London, but operates worldwide, with sales and distribution in the U.S. and Canada being handled by Random House. http://www.titanbooks.com