Richard Sale (2) (1911–1993)

When I stepped outside my Hammett-Chandler-Ross Macdonald comfort zone, the very first hard-boiled crime story I read by a more obscure author was Richard Sale's "A Nose for News." Originally published in Detective Fiction Weekly in 1934, it was funny, fast-paced and engrossing; I was impressed by Sale's ability to cram enough action for a novel into just twenty-three pages. (You can find that story in Ron Goulart's first-rate collection The Hardboiled Dicks.) His skill as a writer is not in show more doubt.

Which makes a book like 1946's Benefit Performance all the more disappointing. It's readable, but so bland and undistinguished that you'll wonder why you even bothered. Sale's humor is intact (that's what got me through the novel), but all the rough edges--the things that made the crime stories in pulp magazines so interesting--have been ground off. This tale of an aging Hollywood star pretending that he's dead to draw his antagonist into the open is a good example of how the crime genre tended to suffer when its authors took the mainstream route. show less

Pretty much the standard early 70s thriller, it's a Bond novel with an American suave and debonair enough to seduce every woman, rich enough to be unimpressed by threats, and rough enough to do some (quite violent) damage to criminals across the globe.

He's answerable to only one man, the President of the United States of America, and only because he really, really wants to defend his country--and the free world--against something called "Keyhole". It means nothing less than...Utter show more Annihilation!!!

Pretty much piffle, then, but nicely paced, and there's something very chauvinistically cool about Bond being a Stars and Stripeser. It was fun to read, it passed an afternoon, and it seemed a good choice to go into Operation Paperback. show less

Two solid stories in this volume. The first takes place in Haiti just before America enters WW II, and the second in Puerto Rico after the war has started. In both cases, we have stalwart male heroes, the first a weatherman posted to an island off the Haitian coast, and the second a radio engineer dispatched to complete construction of a radio tower and signal beam necessary to support the beginning of American cargo flights to Africa by way of Brazil. In both cases, they run into the show more inevitable Nazis. Sale tells both stories well and they remain involving up to the end. The background is well drawn and the characters are fun, if not especially fleshed out. The only jarring notes are the stereotypical and simplistic romantic subplots where our hero always gets his gal. show less

If only we all could follow our power...
and here power is not the kind you buy or beat out of someone, but the inner power of spirit and connection.
It is a parable, and this is what I got out of it:
Accept that where you are, you are meant to be. That anywhere else would not be possible for you to be. Then in the moment of where you are, you have all the power of the universe to act. And you will cause miracles.