Last night’s Plan A of hitting Chestermere Lake with my paddle board was frustrated by a high wind and what looked like an unusually high flow rate along the lake. The lake is part of the Western Irrigation District (WID) system and water flows through it from south to north, but usually very sedately. It wasn’t sedate last night and the water and the wind were both going in the same direction. That, and the fact that I couldn’t see anyone else out on the lake at all told me that staying off of it was probably a good idea. I headed home in a bad mood.
I was coming down 2nd avenue in downtown Strathmore, which is what everyone thinks of as main street in town, when I spotted the Little Library in front of the Wheatland Society of Arts. I generally view the Society of Arts as being populated by a bunch of self-righteous prigs who have a problem with photographers, but they do have one of the better Little Libraries in town, so I pulled in. It has been a while since I conducted a literary panty raid and I was overdue. Besides, finding and reading a book has always been a respectable Plan B (even if the book itself is not respectable).
There are three authors whose books you find more than others in Little Libraries and they are Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler, and James Patterson. The irony of these three authors is that the books bear their names, but are often “collaboratively” written by others now. The marquee author came up with the characters and concept, but the name of the writer appearing in smaller print is the one who actually wrote the book.
Clive Cussler turned out a lot of pulpy novels when I was younger featuring his hero, Dirk Pitt of the National Underwater Marina Agency (NUMA). I think only one of them ever got made into a movie, and it wasn’t a very good movie: Raise the Titanic. Even better, it was discovered afterward that the Titanic had split into two large pieces when it sunk. It couldn’t be raised like it was in the novel and movie, making them even crappier, which no one thought was possible.
Cussler is no longer writing, but his characters live on through other authors. His standout character, Dirk Pitt, has a son who is a carbon copy of his father along with carbon copy supporting characters, all in books written by new authors with their names ever so subtly appearing under Cussler’s. They have become a form of literary herpes and most used bookstores and Little Libraries are infected with them now. People read them and clear them out of their homes immediately after.
The same goes for books by James Patterson and Tom Clancy. Clancy’s books were good, but he has mostly hung up his keyboard and others are carrying on under his name, notably the Ops Center series. Patterson is prolific and has a lot of his own books, but now books are appearing with his name on the masthead over other authors. I haven’t read any of those. Patterson’s books are no good to begin with so I don’t imagine the fake Patterson novels are any better. You have to go pretty low to outdo Cussler in the schlock department, but Patterson does so with gusto.
Harder to find are Steve Berry novels. Steve Berry is a former lawyer and politician who writes meticulously researched historical thrillers and they are rather good. He’s like Dan Brown, except his characters don’t suck. Berry’s Cotton Malone novels are top shelf. People tend to hang onto Berry novels so it’s a treat to find one I haven’t read in a Little Library.
That’s how I came home with one guilty pleasure (Cussler) and one actual score (Berry). There were also Patterson and Clancy Op Center novels in the Little Library because there almost always are, but I left them there. I was careful to avoid touching them. I have a theory that if you touch one of those, any subsequent novel you touch could turn into another Clancy or Patterson novel. Contagion is a bad thing. (Like how any cassette left in a car for more than a fornight turns into a Best of Queen album.)
I think I have the Hardy Boys to blame for my tendency to read trashy literature that is either collaboratively written or ghost written by other authors. I had a huge library of them as a kid, but lost them in a house fire. The Hardy Boys novels have been authored by Frank W. Dixon for decades, but have almost all been ghost-written by other authors. They are formulaic and predictable. And successful. Which is probably why Clancy, Cussler, and Patterson have glommed onto the practice.
Thank God for finding the Steve Berry novel as it may slow my brain rot from reading the other one.
The images in this post are from my cell phone, but were taken by me, not someone else in my name. I haven’t figured out how to make money from my own photography yet, let alone how to sucker someone else into doing that for me.
