The Seven Crystal Balls – Hergé, 1943-48 ★★★

Tintin’s Weird Tale

If any installment of the Tintin series had a right to flop, it was this. While author Hergé was writing it, he found himself suddenly unemployed and arrested for Nazi collaboration. Overnight, he went from pop star to criminal. Also, his mother died.

But The Seven Crystal Balls did not flop; just the opposite. It could be argued the book was the best thing to happen not only to “The Adventures Of Tintin” but Franco-Belgian comics; it helped launch a magazine under the “Tintin” banner that became the mothership for a bevy of comic artists and opened a door for Edgar P. Jacobs, a Hergé collaborator who, after his uncredited co-write here, launched his own milestone franchise, “Blake And Mortimer.”

The Father – August Strindberg, 1887 [Translated by Elizabeth Sprigge] ★½

Throwing Away the Envelope

What would a battle of the sexes look like if participants were less motivated by sexual desire and more by Nietzschean will to power? The Father sets the struggle of man versus woman, or rather husband versus wife, in exactly that context.

Whether the play is valid, illuminating, or entertaining as presented is a different question. I didn’t find it so, but I was born a century after the intended audience. They found this drama convincing enough to help lift its author, August Strindberg, to international fame.

Vanishing Ladies – Ed McBain, 1957 ★★½

Stranger Danger in the Sticks

Pulp fiction is a genre famous for keeping it short. Wham-bam openings; terse dialogue; jump-in action sequences; swift resolutions: What you get is meant to be read fast and enjoyed at once.

Vanishing Ladies presents a baseline example of the genre, with many recognizable staples in place. One variation: the protagonist is a cop, not a private eye or regular joe, which makes sense given author Ed McBain had just launched his 87^th Precinct series of police procedurals the year before publishing this.

Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy, 1874 ★★★½

The Perils of Gaslighting

When a pretty woman flirts with a middle-aged man, you might expect annoyance when he discovers she’s having him on. You don’t expect carnage, which is what happens in this pastoral romantic tragicomedy by Thomas Hardy, Victorian fiction’s master of disaster.

The second of Hardy’s celebrated run of “Wessex” novels, Far From The Madding Crowd details the calamitous romantic history of Bathsheba Everdene, inheritor of a substantial farm in her early twenties who sends a prank valentine to a bachelor named Boldwood who owns the neighboring spread.

The Secret Life Of Walter Winchell – Lyle Stuart, 1953 ★½

Takes One to Know One

What is it like to witness one of history’s most lurid practitioners of below-the-belt gossip-mongering getting served with the same treatment?

Like Walter Winchell, the target of our book, this 1953 hit job is brassy, bitchy, and hard to put down. Once you do, alas, it’s easy to forget.

Moonraker – Ian Fleming, 1955 ★★

No Nukes, No Nookie

Which makes the bigger splash in a James Bond story: A nuclear explosion or a Bond girl that just says no to sex with 007? Moonraker gives you the chance to find out.

As a reading experience, Ian Fleming delivers some marvelous prose; the early glimpses of Bond’s everyday life deepen my appreciation for the character and his world. As a novel, it is one of the weakest Fleming Bond stories; a ridiculous scheme, contrivances galore, and a sloppy, rushed ending.

Killing Reagan – Bill O'Reilly & Martin Dugard, 2015 ★★

He Did It for Jodie

How does one write about a murdering a person where the victim, a U. S. President, lives on for a quarter-century?

If you are producing a lucrative series of books with a running title like Killing So-and-so, you find a way of tying that person’s eventual demise to the murder attempt. That is what Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard did in the case of Ronald Reagan, who went down in history not as a victim of an assassin’s bullet but instead Alzheimer’s disease.