Faceman Presents: Faceman Reads Michael Crichton Books Written Under Pseudonyms

I know you’re all waiting for me to get back to my award winning thread, “Faceman Reads Star Trek Books,” http://www.wordforge.net/index.php?threads/faceman-reads-star-trek-books.107386/ but I’ve taken a break to bring you this important thread about other books that Faceman is reading…and because reading 80 star trek books in a row is pretty fucked up, you know?

Faceman Presents: Faceman Reads Michael Crichton Books Written Under Psuedonyms

Odds On (1966)

Odds On is Crichton’s first published book. Like most of these early books, Odds On is a “crime thriller mystery” whatever thingy. It involves a group of fellows who decide to rob a hotel without anyone at the hotel knowing they’re being robbed. This can only be written in the 60s. Travelers checks. Unsecured jewelry. A hotel safe full of actual cash. Keys that open nearly a quarter of the hotel rooms. They use a computer to figure out the best order to rob the place and enter in variables to gauge their chances of success.

Naturally, things go wrong. They come up a bit short but can’t figure out how. The novel is amateurish and a review I read comparing it to soft core porn wasn’t far off. This is pure male fantasy (sexy women, sexing the sexy women, exotic locales, counter agents, etc.). Not a surprise. Crichton was 24 when this was written and it was four years after Dr. No hit the theaters.

Scratch One (1967)

Scratch One took me a month to read and this is particularly concerning given its miniscule length. Scratch One involves a vague plot about a syndicate of bad guys (really that’s as good a description as I can give) who believe an American agent is coming to foil their plans (vague ones). They mistake the protagonist, a visiting lawyer in Nice, France, as that American agent. His dumb luck helps him avoid kidnapping and assassination attempts through most of the novel, until he finally meets the main bad guy in his evil Bond bad guy lair, only to hang out with him for a bit before deciding to escape. Ultimately, the inept police realize our protagonist is in trouble but employ him anyway to help foil the bad guy’s vague plans, involving an assassination at the Monoco Gran Prix.

It's just the most awful book I’ve ever read.

Easy Go (1968)

Thankfully, it is followed up by Easy Go, a particularly interesting novel about an Egyptologist who enlists some others to locate a lost tomb in Egypt and rob (ransom) it. They enlist some lively characters, including a rich British guy who’s only in it for the fun. The normal tropes of these types of novels occur. Once they find it, it’s booby trapped. Then there’s authorities who continually check up on the status of their official photography expedition. It takes place over about six months with them looking for the tomb at night and pretending to photograph nearby already discovered tombs during the day. I’m not sure when the slept, but they sure partied a lot. It was the 60s.

Naturally, there’s a twist at the very end which is either disappointing or expected, but the journey getting there is pretty good.

Zero Cool (1969)

The same year Crichton published Andromeda Strain, some guy named John Lange published a book about a vacationing radiologist in Spain (literally the same location as in Odds On) who, for some reason, is bullied into doing an autopsy on a dead guy only for one group of bad guys to place a box in the chest cavity. There are many similarities between this book at Scratch One, but this one flowed better. He knew he was in trouble from the beginning. He knew by whom, generally, and while he didn’t make heads or tails of it until the end, the reader at least had a better idea of the stakes and the plot. The finale at the Alhambra was pretty good and the twist at the very very end expected. Crichton himself wrote framing chapters for this book years ago. (DVDs are mentioned).

The Venom Business (1969)

This was the longest one so far – 400 pages – and it only holds together, barely, because of the fucked up characters that the protagonist hangs around with. Why he’s there, no idea. He’s a smuggler who, while in Paris, meets an old acquaintance, a rich British guy. They go to Britain after he hires the smuggler to protect him from assassins. Meanwhile we find out that the guy’s mom hired the smuggler to protect the son as well. Both characters are horrible people and you’re lead to believe that the main character is in some sort of danger, or that the son is in some sort of danger from the mom the entire time.

It’s much odder than that but when you step back and analyze the plot you quickly realize that the protagonist was unnecessary for the story about the mom, the son, the uncle, and business woman from America, to unfold. The result would have occurred the same way anyway and this is highlighted even more by the fact that the main character is not at the scene when the main conspiracy finally occurs.

More later.

Drug of Choice (1970)

This is it. A techno thriller. Finally…until Act III when it goes bonkers. Dr. Roger Clark (literally there is a character in all his books named Roger) is a doctor and meets a couple of comatose patients who pee blue then wake up and the blue pee goes away. He investigates the people taking the drug which leads him to a psychiatrist and ultimately to a science lab in Los Angeles that creates things for no purpose and then finds a purpose of them later. Interesting. He goes on vacation with one of their patients to an island in the Caribbean. It looks nice and a few days later he wakes up in his room with a beard peeing blue. Turns out, the nice vacation was all in his head and he’s being used as an “employee” of the company. The third act goes a bit off the rails as they return to the lab in Los Angeles and he loses his mind, and probably freedom. So while it is a bit “crime thriller” it is also the start of Crichton’s technology based writing.

Dealing: or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues (1970)

This one is horrible. Written under the pseudonym Michael Douglas, because it was written by Michael and Douglas (his brother) Crichton, this is the first person story of a drug dealer. And here’s the thing – pot heads are boring. This guy is one. The first quarter of the book (and much of the later chapters of this mostly plot-less tale) are him talking about drugs, and the drug culture, and the man, and how his parents are squares and don’t approve of him committing federal felonies. Those squares! So the main guy, Peter I think, goes to Berkeley to buy ten bricks and take them back to Boston. While there he witnesses a bust, gets caught by the feds for someone else’s issues (surprise surprise) and meets a girl. He goes home, goes back to class, fails his finals, and gets his dealer friend to get the girl to transport 40 bricks to Boston. This was when you could get on a plane without a colonoscopy by the TSA apparently. She gets caught because she checked one bag and goes back for it. The rest of the book is about how the narc involved was actually taking the evidence and selling it. For some reason the narc worked in both Boston and Berkeley…but whatever. This one was crap!

Grave Descend (1970)

Back to John Lange’s voice, finally. This one is about a diver is Jamaica hired to retrieve items from a wreckage of a yacht. Thing is the yacht, he discovers, hasn’t sunk yet, though he witnesses it sink five minutes later. He goes along anyway, much like the heroes in most of these books. Too curious to walk away from a bad deal. Allegedly the bad guys ripped off the mob and sunk a boat to make it look like the goods are gone. Therefore the mob should go after the diver! But the book never writes the mob in, the tale being convoluted enough. He retrieves the diamonds and gets away. There’s also an alligator and a shark. Hilarity ensues!

One more to go…

Binary (1972)

This one wasn’t bad. It had a more technical side of Crichton – there was an explanation of how a modem works. There were psychological profiles. There was a guy building a nerve gas deployment system from spare parts. But unlike later, and some earlier, novels, the protagonist here was basically a cop. He was State Department Intelligence pitted against…well I was never clear. He was pitted against an upset rich citizen who caught the eye of authorities. This was very Nixonian of course, targeting disruptive citizens via federal agents. In fact, this book is about the 1972 Republican National Convention held in San Diego (oops! Crichton’s dedication to the book notes he was too lazy to change it to Miami after the Republicans did so a few months before it was supposed to occur) and the bad guy’s mission to apparently kill everyone in San Diego while it’s going on. Overkill I guess.

Binary refers to two gases, which when combined create a nerve gas. It is also the code name for the gasses, and I suppose could refer to the protagonist and antagonist who play cat and mouse puzzles for the bulk of the book. Both are named John. The end of the book is basically the cops disabling the nerve gas system and the bombs surrounding them, looking for double and triple booby traps, all very spy novel. The entire book takes place within twelve hours.

Conclusions

These books were interesting to read because it showed Crichton maturing as an author while also writing books with themes and structures drastically different than what he became famous for. I wonder if he found the books easy to read (he wrote twelve books in between 1966 and 1972 versus thirteen works of fiction between 1975 and 2006) and thus published most of them (ten of the twelve) under a pseudonym because he held himself out for better works (see 1969’s Andromeda Strain and 1972’s the Terminal Man). The books ranged from male fantasy, schmucks caught up in a spy novel, zany, and exotic. None were tough to read, though the second one sure was horrible. I must confess I left one book off – A Case of Need (1968) written as Jeffery Hudson. I’d actually read this book already when it was republished under Crichton’s name in the 1990s. It did read more in the vein of Disclosure or Rising Sun than these madcap crime capers. If I recall, it’s about a doctor (naturally) investigating a death following a botched abortion. The rest of the details would require me to dig boxes out of my cavernous garage.

Soon I will have to compare these early books to Crichton’s next (posthumous) title, Dragon Teeth due next month.