Earl Norman

The Earl Norman books are becoming extremely rare, and publishers don’t seem to be interested in reprinting the series. The only way some of us may ever have all the stories is for collectors to scan and type the stories into PDF to swap with other collectors. I have already completed PDFs of HANG ME IN HONG KONG and KILL ME IN ROPPONGI. I am working on KILL ME IN YOKOSUKA. If other collectors would do the same for some of the other books, we could eventually have PDFs of all ten books. Why not help? I can be contacted at fadingshadows40@gmail.com

Sunday, July 20, 2014

The Chinese Pleasure Girl


Curt Stone #4: “The Chinese Pleasure Girl” by Jack Seward. Curt Stone’s Far East Investigations is hired by an ex American CIC agent to find out who is trying to sabotage his bars in Yokosuka. A pretty good plot, with a nice bit of action, and we see a lot of Yokusuka. It’s a fun read, but we still have the main problems with this author. He’s trying to teach us the Japanese language in a fiction novel. We get dialogue in Japanese and repeated in English, which distracts from the flow of the story; plus, just when something is about to happen, he gives us a page or two of documentary on some aspect of Japan, its history, or a subject he wants us to know about Japan. By the time we get back to the scene of action we’ve forgotten what was happening. It slows the pace of the story drastically. It’s a good series, and the interaction between the main characters is fun., I’m just not interested in learning the language, and I can look up whatever information I need on Japan. The author would have been better off sticking to the action.

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