MikeKardec
One Too Many
- Messages
- 1,157
- Location
- Los Angeles
Reading John Bentley's The Perilous Path, a novel about car racing in the late 1950s. Racing has never been a font of good plots for either fiction or film so we'll see how this turns out. So far the atmosphere, Nassau and NYC then moving to Europe is good.
Period detail is a bit odd because, like many at the time and earlier, Bentley dislikes to identify name brand specifications. Sometimes in crime novels this leads to an innocuous, "He gestured with the spike snouted automatic" leaving the reader to either accept the description or to figure that it's probably a Walther or Luger. In this case Bentley seems to have created a wilderness of absolutely convincing, yet fictional, sports and specialty car manufacturers. He was a automotive journalist and I guess he neither wanted to insult or endorse anyone. Some of the substitutions are relatively easy to decode, Panther is probably Jaguar, Milano is probably Alfa Romeo, Ostia is probably O.S.C.A. (a specialty manufacturer run by the Maserati Bros.), but there are fictional companies like Geyr that maybe Porsche or maybe not, and a few others. If anyone knows more about this stuff than I do and can identify these as actual cars then I'll take it all back ... but I think he's being intentionally obscure. Anyway, I'm about a fifth of the way in and so far it's pretty good though not a page turner. Car racing, to me, was very interesting and dramatic until the aerodynamic down force era of the early 1970s got started. Then it became homogenized, a good deal safer, lost it's romance, and the cars lost all similarity to street machines.
Period detail is a bit odd because, like many at the time and earlier, Bentley dislikes to identify name brand specifications. Sometimes in crime novels this leads to an innocuous, "He gestured with the spike snouted automatic" leaving the reader to either accept the description or to figure that it's probably a Walther or Luger. In this case Bentley seems to have created a wilderness of absolutely convincing, yet fictional, sports and specialty car manufacturers. He was a automotive journalist and I guess he neither wanted to insult or endorse anyone. Some of the substitutions are relatively easy to decode, Panther is probably Jaguar, Milano is probably Alfa Romeo, Ostia is probably O.S.C.A. (a specialty manufacturer run by the Maserati Bros.), but there are fictional companies like Geyr that maybe Porsche or maybe not, and a few others. If anyone knows more about this stuff than I do and can identify these as actual cars then I'll take it all back ... but I think he's being intentionally obscure. Anyway, I'm about a fifth of the way in and so far it's pretty good though not a page turner. Car racing, to me, was very interesting and dramatic until the aerodynamic down force era of the early 1970s got started. Then it became homogenized, a good deal safer, lost it's romance, and the cars lost all similarity to street machines.
