Hey! B.C.

 

By Johnny Hart

B.C was a daily newspaper comic strip starting in 1958. This is the first collection of the strips, copyright 1958 and 1959.

B.C. and his group are cave men trying to learn the ways of the world. There are also two cave women but unlike the cave men, who all have names, the cave women merely go by their description, the Cute Chick and the Fat Broad, sadly. (According to Wikipedia, this changed in 2016 with the cute one being named Grace and the ugly one Jane.) 

I loved the B.C. comics as a kid and as a young adult. Going back and rereading this first book in the series has been a real pleasure. Here are a couple strips from the book to enjoy.

Piccadilly Jim

 

By P.G. Wodehouse

Young Jimmy Crocker has been having too much fun and his antics have attracted the attention of the newspapers. So much so that, even though he is currently living in Britain, even the New York papers are reporting on this former New Yorker's peccadilloes. The latest is the knockout punch to the face of a well known young British member of the upper class, Lord Percy Whipple. 

Jim's stepmother is the one who moved Jim and his dad Bingley from New York City to London. Recently married to the dad, Eugenia is crazy to carve a place for herself and Bingley among the nobs. Her great ambition is having Bingley made a lord. But she fears that Jim's latest stunt has spoiled Bingley's chance of achieving that distinction. When Jim hears from his dad how upset the stepmom is, he decides he had best remove himself from the scene and so he heads off to buy a ticket to NYC. While doing so, he encounters and is immediately smitten by the sight of a lovely young woman, Ann Chester. Overhearing her talking to a friend, Jim finds out that, for reasons unknown to him, Ann despises Jimmy Crocker, she says he is a "perfect, utter, hopeless worm." He also figures out that Ann did not recognize him when they spoke briefly earlier. So he books passage on the same ship she will be returning to New York on and introduces himself to her as Bayliss. 

They arrive in New York as fast friends and while dining out together, Jim is recognized by an old friend and greeted by his real name. Naturally Ann is surprised and has questions which he dismisses by claiming no knowledge of this Jimmy Crocker and telling his friend that he is mistaken. Ann believes him. 

Speaking of Ann, her family has its problems too. Namely Ogden Ford. Ann lives with her uncle, Peter Pett. Pett has a wife with a son, this Ogden, who is fourteen and pain in his stepfather's side, sitting in Pett's favorite chair and smoking Pett's cigarettes. Pett wants to ship the boy off to boarding school. The mother refuses to discipline the lad and Ogden has become a spoiled, overweight brat.  Ann and Pett have hatched a scheme to deal with Ogden. They want to kidnap him and send him off to the care of a veterinarian who has had great success getting spoiled, fat pet dogs back in to shape and trained. As Jim becomes more involved with Ann, he gets drawn into the kidnap Ogden plan and soon moves into the Pett mansion.

As a society hostess and famous author, Mrs Pett loves hosting parties and having rising young artists as house guests. But she lives in fear of her precious Ogden being kidnapped, a not unreasonable fear, as Ogden has been kidnapped twice before. The arrival of a new house guest, Ann's new friend Bayliss and that of a new butler at the same time and a word in her ear by one of the other house guests, Lord Wisbeach, has her a bit on edge. So she hires a detective to do some detecting. Things become more and more complicated. Jim has still not revealed his true identity to the woman he has decided is the love of his life, Ann. Who is engaged to Lord Wisbeach, not because she cares for him but because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. 

Wodehouse has certainly worked up a complicated plot here with Jim pretending not to be Jim. And his dad pretending to be a butler. And Lord Wisbeach, who is not a lord of any kind. And the detective pretending to be a parlor maid. And Ogden, who figures out the kidnapping scheme and is fine with it, as long as he gets half of the ransom. As he says, "I've got something valuable to sell, and I'm darned if I'm going to keep giving it away." 

But I didn't find it as amusing as some of Wodehouse's other novels. The machinations of Jim and Ann just can't compare to the mastermind, Jeeves.  I enjoyed the story and enjoyed seeing how Jim got himself out of the entanglement he created. But it never really made me chuckle.

You can read the book online for free at Project Gutenberg.

A Connecticut Fashionista In King Arthur's Court

 

 By Marianne Mancusi

Kat Jones, writer for a fashion magazine in New York, is attending a King Arthur's Faire in order to write an article on the new trend of medieval-style fashion. While there, she runs afoul of a fortune teller, who places a curse upon Kat. It takes effect almost immediately, where Kat is knocked down by a blow to the head. When she come to, she is no longer in the 2000s. No, she has been magically transported back to the land of King Arthur, and face to face with Queen Guenevere, Sir Lancelot and Merlin, the wizard. 

While Kat is not a scholar of English literature, she is somewhat familiar with the legend of King Arthur and the doings at Camelot. So she is a bit surprised to discover that Guenevere and Lancelot are not lovers, as they are portrayed in legend. In fact, Guenevere claims to view Lancelot more like a brother and that she is completely in love with her husband, King Arthur.  Which means Lancelot is there for the pickings, which Kat quickly does, finding Lancelot to be completely irresistible. And he seems to feel to same for her. 

It takes quite a while for Kat to figure out what is really going on. The breakthrough comes when she encounters the fortune teller who put the curse on her back in modern times. Kat was brought to the past by the fortune teller and Merlin to keep Lancelot and Queen Guenevere from getting together resulting in the Queen being put to death and King Arthur losing control of his kingdom. Kat was chosen because, according to the fortune teller, Kat is the only woman in all of time that Lancelot can fall in love with, keeping him from becoming involved with the Queen. Once the historic date of the Queen's execution for infidelity is safely passed, Kat will be free to return to the future.  But what about Lancelot? Kat is wildly in love with him but is the 21st Century the place for an early medieval guy like Lance? And is Kat willing to give up the very real advantages of modern life to live in the past with Lance?

This was an OK read. I didn't like the main character, who seems like a real dummy. She constantly uses modern phrases that anyone with half a brain would know that people in the past would not understand. It's not like she only does that a the beginning of the story. She continues to do it through out and them seems a bit surprised that people don't understand what she means. Also she is astonishingly vulgar and slutty. Maybe that is supposed to be funny? I didn't find it to be so.

I was more than halfway through the book before it began to arouse my interest. It was when I understood that there was a more serious plot than the "modern girl falls for medieval knight" plot. That the struggle to keep the Queen from being executed was also designed to keep Christianity from replacing the local pagan beliefs.

Also, having a better understanding than I did of the legend of King Arthur and Camelot would probably be helpful in enjoying this story. 

Here is a review by Publishers Weekly.

In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead

 

By James Lee Burke

The mutilated corpse of a young woman is found, stuffed into a metal barrel. Cherry LeBlanc was only nineteen when she was killed and dumped and it is detective Dave Robicheaux's job to solve her murder. And a movie star, in town to make a movie, also discovers the bones of a man while out boating. Dave, viewing the remains of the dead man, realizes he was a witness to the man's murder back in 1957, when Dave was a college boy. 

The movie star, Elrod, sometimes has mystical experiences and he shares with Dave his vision of a Confederate general and a warning the general wanted Elrod to give Dave. Of course, Dave dismisses Elrod's warnings until Elrod tells him something that no one, besides Dave himself, could possibly know. 

Before much longer, the Confederate general starts appearing to Dave too and gives him oblique advice that Dave doesn't know how to process. Dave tries to tell himself it's just his mind working through things but even his young daughter has seen the dead general though she doesn't realize he is not real.

So this Confederate stuff is woven all through the story and becomes part of Dave's struggle to bring justice to the two victims, Cherry LeBlanc and the man who was murdered back in 1957. 

The plots of a Dave Robicheaux novel are always rather tangled and hard (for me at least) to follow. But the ghost general sure added to the tangle, bringing an element of the supernatural that I didn't expect from a detective story. I really enjoyed his appearances, thought they added a lot to the story. 

Here is a review by Kirkus.

Making Waves

 

By Tawna Fenske

So Juli Flynn has it rough. She beautiful and smart and sexy and has naturally blonde, curly hair. Poor thing. Anyways, she feels she has it rough, mainly because she "the world's smartest woman" with an IQ of 186. She is fluent in several languages, proficient in several professions, but has never found her place in life, drifting from one thing to another. Then her beloved Uncle Frank passes away and Juli is in charge of scattering his ashes on a coral reef in the Caribbean. 

Problem is Juli is afraid of the ocean. She loved her Uncle Frank and has decided she will hire a boat and dispose of his ashes just as he wished. But first she is going take some motion sickness medicine but has a weird reaction to the medication. In her drugged state, she mistakes a private vessel as the one she hired to take her to her Uncle's chosen resting place. She climbs on board unseen and passes out in the stateroom. No one notices her until they are quite far out to sea. 

Turns out Juli has boarded a pirate boat (ship, whatever, I don't care). And the pirates are a strange lot, not nearly as piratey as one would expect. Turns out they are first time pirates, out to exact revenge on their boss who gave them all the shaft. They expect to intercept a ship belonging to the boss that they think is carrying a hidden cargo of diamonds. Discovering they have a stowaway does not make them happy. Luckily for Juli, these pirates are not really criminal types, despite their plan steal their former boss's diamonds. And Juli, being the world's smartest woman, soon has them all wrapped around her finger. Especially the captain, Alex, who, of course is virile and handsome and lonely and will eventually end up doing the deed with the heroine, Juli. Although the author chooses to draw their courtship out to the very end by making sure neither Juli or Alex has access to condoms for the few days they are stuck on the boat together. 

Even though they are not willing to consummate their relationship without protection, they still have a lot of fun working each other up, including a game of strip Battleship, which runs nine pages of excruciatingly lusty detail.

The plot gets a bit convoluted and involves some real pirates and some dildos and  Juli and one of the beginner pirates dressing up as prostitutes and other such madcap nonsense that is supposed to be hilarious.

Guess it's pretty clear I did not care for the book. I didn't find it funny. The plot is silly, and not in a good way. The characters were not appealing, no matter how hard the author worked to make them quirky and funny. Reading, it felt like the whole purpose of the book was to tantalize the reader with Juli and Alex almost having sex. This book is just one almost-sex scene after the other with a little plot woven in. Like a pornographic novel, where the plot merely serves the sexual activity.