Sunday, September 05, 2004
 
Book Review: Never Live Twice by Dan J. Marlowe (1964, 1974)

At Hooked on Books, they have a bin of books marked Free with Purchase, so I always grab something. Once, I grabbed this book, and I have read it.

I've doubled the publication dates in the header because the book's obviously an early sixties pulp novel, with its lurid cover and almost cartoonish action prose. However, sometime between editions, the "author" updated the setting a decade, changing a World War II secret agent into a Korean vet seamlessly.

Oddly enough, the book is set in Florida, much like Cancel All Our Vows, and like the other book, it features an almost textually unremarkable sexual assault, wherein the main character forces his attentions on a woman because she's the type who needs it. By textually unremarkable, I mean that the book itself glosses over the assault as a matter of course--something reflective of the time and genre, probably.

Aside from that distasteful bit, the book's a good romp. A wife and her brother kill the drunkard husband by sending the husband's Cadillac into a canal when the husband's drunk. The moment the cold water hits the husband, though, he "comes to," thinking he's a secret agent in a Korean river. He's got to deal with his amnesia and to discover what's happened in the twenty years he's lost. Eventually, he recovers enough of his skills and his muscle tone (hidden beneath forty pounds of liquor) to break up a gun-running operation.

It's easy reading, action movies in 60,000 words, and I ate books like this up when I was in high school. Perhaps that's why I grew up misogynistic, my sensitivity destroyed by these books like the Greatest Generation and early boomers, who currently tut-tut hip-hop music for how it depicts women.


- posted by Brian J. @ 4:56 PM
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