Books Ellery Queen and Roger Zelazny

Ellery Queen - Five Complete Novels by Ellery Queen - I've somehow never managed to read any of this series before.  Queen is a rather strange duck in the annals of the fictional detective.  First he gets his own byline on his novels.  Archie Goodwin writes the stories of Nero Wolfe and John Watson those of Sherlock Holmes.  In both cases the actual authors get their names on the spines of the books.  But then the actual authors of Ellery Queen went by pseudonyms themselves!  Daniel Nathan and Manford Lepofsky (two cousins from NYC) wrote and edited as Frederic Dannay and Manford Bennington Lee.  The character of Ellery Queen went through it's own permutations over the years as well.  This much remains the same pretty much through out - Queen solves his mysteries the same way that Wolfe and Holmes did, through the application of a massive intellect.
   The five novels in this collection are "And on the Eighth Day", "The Player on the Other Side", "Inspector Queen's Own Case" "Cat of Many Tails" and "Double, Double".  Even here it's not simple.  Inspector Queen's Own Case in fact doesn't feature Ellery at all, only his father NYPD Inspector Richard Queen.  The Player on the Other Side wasn't written by the cousins but by science fiction great Theodore Sturgeon.  Meanwhile And On the Eighth Day was written by  fantasy and crime writer Avram Davidson.
   All of these novels were written between 1949 and 1964.  The only one I found difficult to get into was And on the Eighth Day which features Queen leaving Hollywood (one of his permutations has him writing scripts in Hollywood for a while) and running into a strange religious community and a murder.  The beginning is strange because Queen is not himself and suffering some delusions.  Other than that the characters are interesting and the mysteries fun to try and puzzle out.  There is a curious sense of removal from the events that is consistent apparently throughout the Queen spectrum.  It feels a little odd at times even in comparison to the other two great detectives noted before.  Other than that it was a good read.
Rating *** Good Read

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny - This is a Hugo award winning novel.  And that defintely means something. At the same time this book just struck me as a little weird.  The story is set in the future, a future where the "gods" have decided that man came too soon to technology and so has wiped it out.  They continue to wipe it out whenever it re-appears, waiting till humanity is ready.  Now in this case these folk have created themselves in the figures of the Hindu gods - Brahma, Vishnu, Kali etc. They are survivors of the human race who used technology to save their lives and expand their talents thereby making themselves gods.  To be honest a lot of this back story slipped by me the first time through.  Enter "Sam" (who has many names including Siddhartha, Buddha, Kalkin and more) who thinks that humanity should be given its head and technology and have at it.  Eventually push comes to shove and war breaks out.
   I am a big Zelazny fan.  Once I read the Amber books I was hooked.  He does exactly this kind of epic deconstruction of epics as well as anyone.  He has total command of the material.  The characters leap off the page even when you're not quite clear who they are and what they are doing in the grand scheme.  In the end I guess the ultimate accolade I can give the book is that it wouldn't let me give up on it no matter how confused I was.

Rating - *** Good Read