Recently read: Indiana Jones and the Philosopher's Stone

Picked this up at the Book Hut in Ocean Shores, Wa. It was in perfect condition and didn't have a sticker on it, and sure enough the nice lady running the place charged me retail for it and two others. I hadn't known they carried new books, and now my bill was about twice what I planned to spend.

Now look. I try not to let myself think of bookstores as charity cases in need of a handout, or public services I should support, like PBS . I've got kids, not to mention a serious book habit, and a gentleman junkie's gotta make his dollar stretch as far as he can. I'll buy a book used if at all possible, which, let's be honest, is a big screw you to the authors I admire so much as well as all retail sellers everywhere. And if I must buy new I don't let all those appeals to support my independent bookseller keep me from using the coupons Borders sends me every week, or ordering from Amazon with their deep discounts and 4-for-3 deals and free shipping.

I still pay full price sometimes, for the usual stupid reasons retailers have counted on since time immemorial. Mostly impulse buys at the grocery store where that seven bucks will be buried in this week's food bill (don't tell the wife). And of course there are some books you just gotta have now. Yesterday. Before the ink dries. So I've paid my retail dues, man. Don't try to lay your bourgeois guilt trip on this free spirit. Je suis un bohémien.

So I turned around and marched those books right back to their shelves.

No. No I didn't.

Because the Book Hut is one of those shops that every time you go back you're surprised to find them still in business, and they're moving next month into a space where they'll actually have to pay rent (they've been squatting in a church fellowship center of some kind). And I was on vacation, spending too much money anyway. And the nice lady actually had been very nice. And most importantly nobody wants to look like a cheapskate.

So I bought the books. A cultural history of Weimar Germany by Eric Weitz. A memoir by Bill Bryson. An original anthology from DAW, Cthulhu's Reign. And the Indiana Jones book, which I read in two big gulps that day and the next.

There are a dozen books in this series, by three different authors. They were originally published in the 90s and reprinted by Bantam a few years back to promote and be promoted by the fourth Indy movie. They all have gorgeous covers by Drew Struzan, who has never produced an ungorgeous cover and has been associated with Indy for a long time.

Struzan paints, but he uses rendering and shading techniques that make it look like a highly detailed pencil sketch has come to life in delirious technicolor. His stuff has a glow to it that turns realistic portraiture into a kind of hyper-realism. He's a little like Thomas Kinkade, except not evil and with more rotting heads on sticks. Maybe if Kinkade put more evil in his paintings his life wouldn't be oozing with it.

I've got two of these now and I might get the rest just for the covers. I'm definitely going to buy all the Max McCoy titles, because this one was a great read.

I don't want to overstate the case for this book. This isn't filet mignon disguised as hamburger. It's just a really good hamburger. Should you be reading a hamburger when life is short and more nutritious books are easy to find and just as cheap? Good question.

There's a fuzzy line between adult and young adult fiction and this book is aimed squarely at it. The grue is just gruesome enough. There's just the barest hint of titillation. A little educational content is mixed in. Indy - pardon me - Dr. Jones tells his students the story of Schliemann and Troy. Brief and painless infodumps are scattered about. There's even a kind of Notes for the Curious afterword explaining the historical realities behind the fiction.

Philosopher's Stone starts, as it should, with a fast-paced action set piece in a lost city. There's a native guide, a tomb full of death traps, bad guys (Italian fascisti in this case), etc. The story bounces from Central America to Princeton to London to Rome and finally to North Africa and another tomb, supposedly that of Hermes Trismegistus, "thrice-great Hermes", the man-god who founded the hermetic traditions and knew the secrets of alchemy. The macguffin that drives the plot is the Voynich Manuscript, stolen from Yale.

McCoy is very good with action and plotting, only a little less so with dialogue. He shifts point of view around a bit promiscuously in places, for my taste anyway. Nothing that will get in the way of your enjoyment unless you're hopelessly finicky about these things. He creates a suitably vile villain and a Love Interest Who is More Than She Seems, and he handles the recurring characters well: their voices, and the relationships between them. You can effortlessly imagine the respective actors in their roles.

I've given up on otherwise excellent books because the author stuffed period detail down my throat just to prove he did his research. McCoy doesn't make that mistake. He remembers the Great Depression was going on but no one is obliged to call a bum a "Forgotten Man". Indy empties his pockets at one point but the ticket stub that falls out isn't for The Garden of Allah, it's just a ticket stub. McCoy avoids blatant anachronisms and doesn't sweat the details. Babe Ruth is mentioned at one point. Somebody lights a Lucky Strike. That's plenty.

Early in the novel Indy is in bad shape. Unemployed, snubbed by his peers, feeling unappreciated and depressed, he visits Marcus Brody in New York. At this point, several years before Raiders, they have a business relationship, friendly but not close.

On the sidewalk in front of Carmine's, Indy thanked Marcus Brody for dinner and remarked that he felt better, though Brody should have warned him about the garlic. Brody laughed and observed that Indy did look better, although to himself he allowed it may have been from the reddish glow of the restaurant's neon sign.

"Where are you staying?" Brody inquired. "You are welcome to take up digs with me while you're here in the city."

"Thanks, but I'm afraid I would just be underfoot," Indy said. "You've worried enough about my health as it is. I think I'll take a stroll downtown and look for a quiet room where I can pass a day or two and organize myself. Study the Times want ads, polish my resume, that sort of thing (...)"

"Of course," Brody said. "But do keep in touch. If you need anything" -and by this Indy knew that Brody meant money- "by all means let me know. And, Indy- I know things will soon turn around for you. This business at Princeton is nothing but a misunderstanding."

Indy offered his hand.

Brody reached to grasp it, and Indy drew him into a bear hug.

"My word," Brody said when Indy had released him. His face had turned a few shades redder than even the neon sign could make it. "No need to be overly sentimental."

"No need," Indy agreed.

A nice moment that (among other things) reminds us of the friendship the two will share later, thus borrowing a bit of emotional capital from the movies we all know and, presumably, love.

Indy wanders the mean streets for a bit, interviews a conveniently knowledgeable bookseller and trips over a clue. Suddenly he needs to get to London fast, which in 1933 is a bit of a problem. He calls a contact in army intelligence and...

The airship U.S.S. Macon was a gleaming silver torpedo the length of two and one half football fields. On her sides were the familiar star-within-a-circle emblems of naval airpower, and the trailing edges of her tail fins were painted red, white, and blue. The American flag fluttered in the breeze beneath a gun-port that bristled from her tail. The taxi that wheeled up beneath her belly at the U.S. Naval Air Station at Lakehurst, New Jersey, seemed like a toy in comparison.

The Macon had been towed out of her enormous, cocoonlike hangar and was slowly beginning to lift skyward for her maiden flight across the Atlantic. The navy would not permit her schedule to be delayed for the arrival of a last-minute civilian passenger, although it would grudgingly allow passage - if the tag-along could arrive on time.

Indy arrives in the nick of time and steps aboard. Booooriiing! Try again.

An army staff car was parked beneath the dirigible, and a fresh-faced lieutenant bounded out of the car to meet Indy. In his hand was a thick brown envelope.

"Dr. Jones," he said, "the major instructed me to give you this."

"Thanks." Indy tucked the envelope inside his jacket.

...

"I'm sorry you didn't make it in time," the lieutenant said. Indy looked skyward. The aircraft hid the sun, covering the field in an unnatural twilight; (...) She was under power, and began to rise. On command, the sailors were releasing her mooring lines, beginning with the lines at her tail.

Admitting defeat, Indy walks away, planning his next move. You know better than that.

"She's not gone yet," Indy said.

He hesitated a moment. A trio of husky sailors struggled with the mooring line dangling from the dirigible's nose, waiting for the command to release.

"I know I'm going to hate this part," Indy said.

The defining quality of genre fiction is that it fulfills expectations. You can do it in an unexpected way or with a knowing wink or what have you, but you must give the customers what they paid for. If you don't you're playing a different game with higher stakes, and God go with you.

Fulfilling those expectations isn't just a negative matter of "stay within the lines or displease your audience". The writer, if he is not merely pandering, leads a kind of call-and-response with his genre-savvy readers. The moment Jones is told he didn't make it you know he's going to get on that ship. McCoy draws out your anticipation for a few paragraphs, increasing the pleasure, then Indy is off and running. A character raises passenger pigeons. Later those birds will be used to send messages. Someone keeps a Louisville Slugger in his cabin. That bat might as well have This machine kills fascists inscribed on it. The book is full of such pleasures, and if that doesn't recommend it to you, you should put down the bullwhip and fedora and play elsewhere.