Confessions of a paperback junkie

By Ted Pease

©1998

I know I’m a junkie. I don’t make any excuses about it anymore.

I’ve always had the habit — my parents gave it to me. Always pushing stuff on me — Try this! What about this one? This is sooooo good. You’ll like this . . . . I was hooked early. Let me run a few names by you: Alistair MacLean. Ngaio Marsh. Ian Fleming. John D. MacDonald. Helen MacInnes. John LeCarré. Agatha Christie. If you know them, you’re a junkie, too.

I took the habit with me when I went away to college. My freshman roommate at the University of Washington was a dorky Engineering major named Bruce, already engaged to his high school sweetheart, Sharon — neither of them got it at all.

It got really bad later, after I moved to the Big Apple. I just couldn’t get enough.

It was the commute that did it, really. I mean, when you spend that much time — three hours on a good day — you pretty much need it. I did, anyway. All I could get.

John Grisham. Sue Grafton. Pat Conroy. Michael Crichton. Robert B. Parker. Patricia Cornwell. Dick Francis. Even, I’m embarrassed to admit, Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy. A regular at every corner used book store, I’d make my furtive exchanges after hours, scrounging spare change from the car upholstery to score a brown paper grocery bag fix of limp, sometimes yellowing paperbacks.

My name is Pease, and I’m a pulp fiction junkie. Is there a 12-step program for me?

It’s a shameful confession for a former English lit major, but I had the monkey on my back. I had it bad. Not that I’m recovered, but my habit is under control. Now when I read recreationally, I almost always remember it afterward. For a while.

Since I’m packing up for a trip to my summer sanitarium, and loading some really good stuff in my bag, I thought I might be able to, um, turn some of you on to some of the best of my paperback pulp fiction habit.

My wife says I’m a paperback whore. It is true that there is almost nothing I won’t read. After years on the bus-subway circuit, commuting with the rest of the dull-eyed hordes, I’ll prop anything up in front of what passes for my brain. And because I rarely actually pay attention, I can read the same thing again a year later and derive the same benefits.

For optimum mindless, aimless passing of time, I tend toward detective/mystery stuff, plus the lawyer/crime category, espionage and private eyes (I was weaned on Bond, James Bond, after all), and have been passionate about a small number of sci-fi/fantasy people — Arthur C. Clark, Frank Herbert, Ursula LeGuin, C.S. Lewis, Robert A. Heinlein.

My vacation sanitarium destination this week is the family house on an island off the coast of Maine, where we have been hoarding books, the great and the less-so, for more than 40 years. Being there will be an orgy of rediscovery and rereading. Jumbled among the nautical and maritime (A Cruising Guide to the New England Coast, for example, Peter Freuchen’s classic Book of the Seven Seas, and a 1937 edition of H.A. Calahan’s Learning to Sail) is an archeological dig of my literary lifetime, from childhood Hardy Boys to adolescent submarine and WWII fixations to the remnants of high school and college lit classes to a veritable treasure trove of trash.

For what it’s worth, since everyone else seems to be dishing out their top-100 lists, here are some of my top picks to satisfy your reading urges, noble and otherwise.

Since it’s Maine, E.B. White’s One Man’s Meat, first published in 1938, remains on my best-ever list. Continuing in the maritime theme, one of the best new books I’ve read this year is Sebastian Junger’s true story of fishermen and the sea, The Perfect Storm. For more nautica, add Annie E. Proulx’s Pulitzer-winner, The Shipping News, and, from the opposite coast, David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars. Inland, I liked Nicholas Evans’ The Horse Whisperer, at least until Robert Redford got ahold of it, and Howard Frank Moser’s stuff from northern Vermont, starting with A Stranger in the Kingdom, is excellent. I’m looking forward to John Irving’s reemergence with A Widow for One Year, touted as his best since Garp and Owen Meany, both of which fit somewhere up there. And high among my perennial rereadable Top 10 is always J.R.R. Tolkien — The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I’m not sure it’s on my favorites list, but I just read Edward Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang for the first time and thoroughly enjoyed it.

But let’s leave the literature and talk about some serious pulp.

In the courtroom/lawyer category, there are the obvious names — John Grisham, Scott Turow, etc. — to which I would add the names Richard North Patterson, Steve Martini, John T. Lescroart and William J. Coughlin.

In the detective/crime category, I like classic Dick Francis, of course, and there’s only one Elmore Leonard. For quirky, there’s no one like Carl Hiaasen. Leonard, Hiaasen and humor columnist Dave Barry combined with a dozen other mystery novelists recently, each contributing a chapter of the really silly Naked Came the Manatee.

Nelson DeMille is good — try his latest Plum Island. And for the title more than anything else, I recently picked up something called Who in Hell Is Wanda Fuca?, about a Pacific Northwest PI, which was worth the 80 cents I paid for the title alone. But for my money, the best, smartest, most convoluted thriller writer is Thomas Gifford, beginning with The Wind Chill Factor and, especially, The Assassini.

Other names to check out in the mystery/thriller area: John Sandford (his “Prey” series), John Kellerman, Tony Hillerman, and Patricia Cornwell. For pure mindless but entertaining private-eye popcorn, there’s Sue Grafton, whose alphabet series is up to M; Robert B. Parker’s glib private eye, Spenser; and John D. MacDonald’s lovable sexist hunk Travis McGee.

Many of my friends and colleagues tend toward biography and history to while away the idle hour, but my addictions are more low-brow — the kind touted on back covers as “pot-boilers,” “page-turners,” “midnight oil-burners,” “hair-raising,” “un-put-downable” “taut legal thrillers” told “with panache and a sardonic sense of humor” that “race at breakneck speed” to “stunning and catastrophic denouement.”

So I’m heading for the hammock with a couple of page-turners for a rollicking good read. And maybe a nap. Enjoy.

This column appeared in the Logan Herald-Journal on July 17, 1998.