Andrew
Evan Hunter wrote close to 150 novels in his career. This is his very first one, originally published as The Evil Sleep! under his own name in 1952 and later re-released as So Nude, So Dead and credited to his most famous pen name, Ed McBain, in 2015.
As a debut novel, it's predictably a little rough around the edges with a fair few contrivances to push the plot forward. But also on display is the unique voice that Hunter would sharpen to a razor over the course of his career. For example, a passage at the start of Chapter 11 where he likens the unraveling murder mystery to a musical composition coming together:
Look at it like a sheet of music, a complicated score with difficult fingering.
Start a beautiful melody called Eileen, play it light, allegro, for twenty-two bars. Then kill it.
Bring in your subordinate theme, label it Charlie Massine, start it softly, with reminiscent snatches of the main theme, bring it to a climax. Kill it.
Then pull in your beautiful melody again, and this time weave it through with snatches of underlying currents: Babs, Tony Sanders, Dale Kramer, Peter Chalmers.
Sustain a heavy bass with the Peter Chalmers motif, sprinkled with a Dale Kramer pecking at the upper register.
Start a fast-traveling, frantic boogie, label it Tony Sanders. Pull in a handful of harmonious chords, full, throbbing, lingering, and call them Barbara Cole.
Then play them all together in a violent, sombre dance of death touched lightly with sixteen ounces of heroin. Move your fingers furiously, and try to find the key.
If you’re the police, add a single note, and keep pounding at it with one finger. The note is Ray Stone, hophead. That’s the key.
Being from 1952, there are other bits of the book that are unintentionally amusing to the modern reader...Ray Stone is a heroin addict, so of course he is a jazz musician (as is every other drug addict in the book) and there's a tearful description of how his fate was sealed from the very first time he smoked reefer. Every description (every description) of a woman starts with her breasts and moves downward.
Evan Hunter wrote close to 150 novels in his career. This is his very first one, originally published as The Evil Sleep! under his own name in 1952 and later re-released as So Nude, So Dead and credited to his most famous pen name, Ed McBain, in 2015.
As a debut novel, it's predictably a little rough around the edges with a fair few contrivances to push the plot forward. But also on display is the unique voice that Hunter would sharpen to a razor over the course of his career. For example, a passage at the start of Chapter 11 where he likens the unraveling murder mystery to a musical composition coming together:
Look at it like a sheet of music, a complicated score with difficult fingering.
Start a beautiful melody called Eileen, play it light, allegro, for twenty-two bars. Then kill it.
Bring in your subordinate theme, label it Charlie Massine, start it softly, with reminiscent snatches of the main theme, bring it to a climax. Kill it.
Then pull in your beautiful melody again, and this time weave it through with snatches of underlying currents: Babs, Tony Sanders, Dale Kramer, Peter Chalmers.
Sustain a heavy bass with the Peter Chalmers motif, sprinkled with a Dale Kramer pecking at the upper register.
Start a fast-traveling, frantic boogie, label it Tony Sanders. Pull in a handful of harmonious chords, full, throbbing, lingering, and call them Barbara Cole.
Then play them all together in a violent, sombre dance of death touched lightly with sixteen ounces of heroin. Move your fingers furiously, and try to find the key.
If you’re the police, add a single note, and keep pounding at it with one finger. The note is Ray Stone, hophead. That’s the key.
Being from 1952, there are other bits of the book that are unintentionally amusing to the modern reader...Ray Stone is a heroin addict, so of course he is a jazz musician (as is every other drug addict in the book) and there's a tearful description of how his fate was sealed from the very first time he smoked reefer. Every description (every description) of a woman starts with her breasts and moves downward.
Updated a reading goal:
Read 48 books in 2026
Progress so far: 36 / 48 75%
Could we, could I, have done otherwise? Could I have lived differently? Fruitless interrogation. Of course I could, but I did not, and therein lies the absurdity of even asking.
A beautifully written examination of loss, grief, and memory. The plot is thin (a sad man looks back on his life) but the prose is lyrical and evocative. The whole thing has the impression of being one long run-on sentence, although it is not...a conversation with his wife in hospice seamlessly blends into a memory of holding hands with his first girlfriend at the age of 11 which is interrupted by someone asking if he would like a refill and him realizing that he's sitting in a cafe and 6 weeks have passed since that conversation with his wife and he doesn't know how he got there. It's like following the train of thought of someone trying very hard not to think about anything in particular.
It's a short but impactful story with a few particularly poignant passages that will resonate with anyone who has suffered love and loss before.
_____
My Rating Scale
5 stars - An all-time classic, a book that fundamentally changed or enriched my life. Would recommend to any and all readers.
4 stars - An excellent book that stands out in one or more areas of writing style, characterization, making a point, etc. Would recommend to anyone with even a passing interest in the genre or subject matter.
3 stars - A perfectly serviceable book that may be entertaining or informative but does not push the envelope or linger long in the memory. Would recommend to pre-existing fans of the genre or author.
2 stars - A book that falls short in one or more areas of writing style, characterization, making a point, etc. Would only recommend with reservations or would not recommend at all.
1 star - A book that has nothing to say, or says it so poorly it isn't worth reading. Would not recommend and would actively warn away from.
Could we, could I, have done otherwise? Could I have lived differently? Fruitless interrogation. Of course I could, but I did not, and therein lies the absurdity of even asking.
A beautifully written examination of loss, grief, and memory. The plot is thin (a sad man looks back on his life) but the prose is lyrical and evocative. The whole thing has the impression of being one long run-on sentence, although it is not...a conversation with his wife in hospice seamlessly blends into a memory of holding hands with his first girlfriend at the age of 11 which is interrupted by someone asking if he would like a refill and him realizing that he's sitting in a cafe and 6 weeks have passed since that conversation with his wife and he doesn't know how he got there. It's like following the train of thought of someone trying very hard not to think about anything in particular.
It's a short but impactful story with a few particularly poignant passages that will resonate with anyone who has suffered love and loss before.
_____
My Rating Scale
5 stars - An all-time classic, a book that fundamentally changed or enriched my life. Would recommend to any and all readers.
4 stars - An excellent book that stands out in one or more areas of writing style, characterization, making a point, etc. Would recommend to anyone with even a passing interest in the genre or subject matter.
3 stars - A perfectly serviceable book that may be entertaining or informative but does not push the envelope or linger long in the memory. Would recommend to pre-existing fans of the genre or author.
2 stars - A book that falls short in one or more areas of writing style, characterization, making a point, etc. Would only recommend with reservations or would not recommend at all.
1 star - A book that has nothing to say, or says it so poorly it isn't worth reading. Would not recommend and would actively warn away from.
Pretty standard fantasy fare that tries a few interesting things but ultimately runs out of steam.
The book deals with Minalan, the resident wizard of a relatively small backwater province who finds him self central to defending against a goblin imvasion. This present day story is interspersed with flashbacks to his wizard training and prior military service in a war against the "Mad Mage of Farise."
It does have a few clever ideas, like acknowledging that the goblins aren't necessarily in the wrong for wanting to reconquer their ancestral lands that humans drove them out of. However, that's outweighed by its shortcomings: it can never decide whether it's a serious, grimdark story, or an irreverent, MCU-style quipfest. Whoever was hired to edit/proofread gave up 2/3rds of the way through. And although some plot elements are carefully set up in the first half where A leads to B leads to C, the concluding chapters just panic and skip straight to somewhere around J out of the blue.
_____
My Rating Scale
5 stars - An all-time classic, a book that fundamentally changed or enriched my life. Would recommend to any and all readers.
4 stars - An excellent book that stands out in one or more areas of writing style, characterization, making a point, etc. Would recommend to anyone with even a passing interest in the genre or subject matter.
3 stars - A perfectly serviceable book that may be entertaining or informative but does not push the envelope or linger long in the memory. Would recommend to pre-existing fans of the genre or author.
2 stars - A book that falls short in one or more areas of writing style, characterization, making a point, etc. Would only recommend with reservations or would not recommend at all.
1 star - A book that has nothing to say, or says it so poorly it isn't worth reading. Would not recommend and would actively warn away from.
Pretty standard fantasy fare that tries a few interesting things but ultimately runs out of steam.
The book deals with Minalan, the resident wizard of a relatively small backwater province who finds him self central to defending against a goblin imvasion. This present day story is interspersed with flashbacks to his wizard training and prior military service in a war against the "Mad Mage of Farise."
It does have a few clever ideas, like acknowledging that the goblins aren't necessarily in the wrong for wanting to reconquer their ancestral lands that humans drove them out of. However, that's outweighed by its shortcomings: it can never decide whether it's a serious, grimdark story, or an irreverent, MCU-style quipfest. Whoever was hired to edit/proofread gave up 2/3rds of the way through. And although some plot elements are carefully set up in the first half where A leads to B leads to C, the concluding chapters just panic and skip straight to somewhere around J out of the blue.
_____
My Rating Scale
5 stars - An all-time classic, a book that fundamentally changed or enriched my life. Would recommend to any and all readers.
4 stars - An excellent book that stands out in one or more areas of writing style, characterization, making a point, etc. Would recommend to anyone with even a passing interest in the genre or subject matter.
3 stars - A perfectly serviceable book that may be entertaining or informative but does not push the envelope or linger long in the memory. Would recommend to pre-existing fans of the genre or author.
2 stars - A book that falls short in one or more areas of writing style, characterization, making a point, etc. Would only recommend with reservations or would not recommend at all.
1 star - A book that has nothing to say, or says it so poorly it isn't worth reading. Would not recommend and would actively warn away from.
This is an interesting, philosophical mystery novel in which a series of unfortunate, unexplainable events befall a rebellious samurai lord while his castle is under siege. Is it divine retribution, the work of a brilliant and inscrutable enemy, or his own paranoia and creeping doubts that are to blame?
This is not my usual type of book but I still enjoyed it. I only picked it up because I read an effusively positive review for the movie version, which just came out this year. I did not realize until the end of this book (not a spoiler) that it is historical fiction and at least partially based on real-world events. There was a real Araki Murashige who rebelled against the real Oda Nobunaga and took the real Kuroda Kanbei prisoner. How much this novel invents or deviates from actual events, I do not know. I was able to follow all the events without knowing this ahead of time, but someone better versed in samurai history may find a deeper level of appreciation in this retelling.
Some of the dialogue felt stilted and out of place. There's more than a few archaic words like ye, shan't, 'tis, etc., that pop up. Whether that's a side effect of the translation or a reflection of the overly formal,traditonal samurai code, I couldn't tell. It felt inconsistently used throughout the book and stuck out whenever it was used.
Despite that, the story moves along fairly smoothly and the central mystery draws to a satisfying conclusion and the philosophical theme of the book sticks the landing.
_____
My Rating Scale
5 stars - An all-time classic, a book that fundamentally changed or enriched my life. Would recommend to any and all readers.
4 stars - An excellent book that stands out in one or more areas of writing style, characterization, making a point, etc. Would recommend to anyone with even a passing interest in the genre or subject matter.
3 stars - A perfectly serviceable book that may be entertaining or informative but does not push the envelope or linger long in the memory. Would recommend to pre-existing fans of the genre or author.
2 stars - A book that falls short in one or more areas of writing style, characterization, making a point, etc. Would only recommend with reservations or would not recommend at all.
1 star - A book that has nothing to say, or says it so poorly it isn't worth reading. Would not recommend and would actively warn away from.
This is an interesting, philosophical mystery novel in which a series of unfortunate, unexplainable events befall a rebellious samurai lord while his castle is under siege. Is it divine retribution, the work of a brilliant and inscrutable enemy, or his own paranoia and creeping doubts that are to blame?
This is not my usual type of book but I still enjoyed it. I only picked it up because I read an effusively positive review for the movie version, which just came out this year. I did not realize until the end of this book (not a spoiler) that it is historical fiction and at least partially based on real-world events. There was a real Araki Murashige who rebelled against the real Oda Nobunaga and took the real Kuroda Kanbei prisoner. How much this novel invents or deviates from actual events, I do not know. I was able to follow all the events without knowing this ahead of time, but someone better versed in samurai history may find a deeper level of appreciation in this retelling.
Some of the dialogue felt stilted and out of place. There's more than a few archaic words like ye, shan't, 'tis, etc., that pop up. Whether that's a side effect of the translation or a reflection of the overly formal,traditonal samurai code, I couldn't tell. It felt inconsistently used throughout the book and stuck out whenever it was used.
Despite that, the story moves along fairly smoothly and the central mystery draws to a satisfying conclusion and the philosophical theme of the book sticks the landing.
_____
My Rating Scale
5 stars - An all-time classic, a book that fundamentally changed or enriched my life. Would recommend to any and all readers.
4 stars - An excellent book that stands out in one or more areas of writing style, characterization, making a point, etc. Would recommend to anyone with even a passing interest in the genre or subject matter.
3 stars - A perfectly serviceable book that may be entertaining or informative but does not push the envelope or linger long in the memory. Would recommend to pre-existing fans of the genre or author.
2 stars - A book that falls short in one or more areas of writing style, characterization, making a point, etc. Would only recommend with reservations or would not recommend at all.
1 star - A book that has nothing to say, or says it so poorly it isn't worth reading. Would not recommend and would actively warn away from.