In 1997 in my review on amazon, I lamented the fact that this book was out of print. However, thanks to the foresight of Author22 Publishers, the book has been returned to the active file. Readers now can find a more readable edition available: print is larger and clearer. The book now resembles what it is: social commentary combined with glorious story-telling, and avoids the misleading cover of old that suggested some soap opera romance. This work is highly recommended to those with an interest in the historical Amerasian children and their sad fate. Buy this book!

This novel defies categorization, which confounds the marketing people. In its original form, it seemed to have a romance novel cover and appeal. On the contrary, it is in the tradition of Thornbirds or Raj Quartet. This is a tragic story of an ainoko, or Japanese son of an American GI during the U.S. Occupation. A scathing and realistic depiction of America's military presence and its ethnocentricism, it contrasts sharply with the sad life of Heinie, the half-breed who is rejected as well by the purists of the Japanese culture. The work is written by former film star,Jan Merlin, whose face is familiar to movie goers and television fans of the 50s and 60s as one of the most notorious villains. Here he shows why he won an Emmy for his writing for television in 1976. The story contains a harrowing view of Hiroshima after nuclear conflagration and the Japanese theatre world after the war. Like many great epic stories, this one defies a single label. It is for readers to rediscover and to cherish, as they surely will. Highly recommended

Veteran Hollywood character actor Jan Merlin has based this novel on one of the most remarkable experiences of his life--- his participation in a film called THE LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER. The novel's hero, Kurt Mitchell, undergoes a year-long makeup ordeal identical to Jan's, and like Jan is cheated of screen credit though he plays one of the film's key roles. Apart from this Jan gives a vivid picture of the Hollywood studio system in its dying days, and the horrors of location filming (Ireland for the actual film, Brazil for the imaginary film that is the basis of the novel). He has also added a subplot involving a series of child murders. The whole mix works quite well; as usual in Jan's novels the characters all come to life, whether based on real people or not, and the evocation of sights, sounds, odors and details is so vivid in each of the novel's scenes that the reader seems to be there. At about 200 pages, and with situations that keep you turning the pages, this is a particularly fine book for summer reading.

As one who teaches film studies, I am often surprised at how much is formulaic in the movie business. Yet, some of the most formulaic movies (murder mysteries, special effects stories) may contain the most surprises. This roman a clef tells the story of a famous Hollywood tale and the movie that serves as its backdrop. Readers of this fascinating account may be surprised, pleasantly and not, by the attitudes of big stars and bigger directors. Done in a movie script format, the novel only underscores the cruel fiction of "entertainment" in the Hollywood mode. How much is true? From my own historical studies, I would say more than not; and what is not true may be changed to protect the illusions movie fans live by. Was it John Ford who used the tag line to "print the legend"? Well, Jan Merlin prints the legend with warts and all. A must read for anyone who thinks he knows the movie business and movie trivia.

Wow! I can hardly wait to see the E! network version of this great book. If you want the inside picture of the movie business, this book has it all over The Player. The author knows what really happens on a movie set and in the makeup room. This one will blow the roof off one of the big studios! Highly recommended for film buffs.

Widowed Polish immigrant mother Jadwiga hasn't got a chance. To support herself and her two beloved children, Andrew and Caroline, she works hellish hours at the most menial and demeaning jobs. While Jadwiga scrubs, her children are constantly in peril, but while Andrew narrowly escapes street crime and a murderous pedophile, and the lovely Caroline finds out being a kept woman isn't all that glamorous, they seem to be doing all right... until.... Jan has actually combined two different novels, originally set in different time periods, fairly seamlessly here to tell a continually moving and compelling story. He has also re-created the world of his own youth--- the people, the places, the bleakness and the unexpected joys. His lyrical evocations of character and situation made for a novel I had trouble putting down. I finally just sat up half the night and finished it.

Jan Merlin has done it again! This time he has turned his attention to a setting closer to home: growing up in New York's tenements during the days of the Great Depression and World War II. Clearly now an author at the top of his game, Merlin presents the horrors of a poverty-stricken childhood without the depressing and unremitting perspective of McCourt's Angela's Ashes. Though the heavy burden of life's tragedies withers many, Merlin's world contains a tone that puts these events into perspective. A modern study in Naturalism, this is literature at its finest: Though Johnny Weismuller shows up only briefly for a swan dive, he represents the hopes of the times and the expectations of an immigrant Polish family. This is a remarkable book, and in my opinion, the most accessible of all of Merlin's novels; it speaks to Americans about the American dream in a way people will accept and revere.

From the pen of Emmy award winning scriptwriter Jan Merlin comes a gripping adventure novel dealing with the quest for the source of the Nile as told from the point of view of "Bombay", the gunbearer. This is a carefully researched, densely plotted, richly characterized novel which is packed with incident and conceived and executed on a grand scale. It vividly brings Africa and its people to life. It would make a good film and is likely to appeal to those who like to be transported from their armchairs to another time and place.

A unique evocation of what it was like to safari in Africa in the mid-19th Century. The author's "voice" allows us to saturate ourselves in the colors, textures, odors, sounds, and sensations of a trek through wildest Africa. I've never read anything quite like this, in terms of transporting the reader far from the here and now, to a long-vanished world. The novel also tries to do justice to a long-forgotten historical figure, the explorer Speke, whose untimely death and rivalry with the much-more-famous Burton have conspired to cheat him of almost all credit for his incredible exploits. But the character you won't soon forget is the narrator, "Bombay," whose vocabulary and viewpoint are quite unique to English literature! Recommended!

The book is unattractively printed and bound, with many typos. The compelling nature of the text keeps these from being as distracting as they otherwise might be.

History is finally put right by this brilliant book. For decades bad movies and bad novels have depicted the native Africans who contributed to the opening up of the Dark Continent to Western explorers as cowardly buffoons. Now, in his remarkable novel, author Jan Merlin presents a picture of the quintessential safari gunbearer as a narrator with dignity, intelligence, and importance to the mission of finding the NileÕs source in the 1850s. For the first time in historical fiction, the black man of Africa is given his own voice from the tumultuous colonial expeditions of the nineteenth century. This is the true story, based on seldom consulted records, of the gunbearer whose single-handed heroism virtually created the British explorersÕ fame. The main feature of GUNBEARER is that it seems as if Out of Africa were told, not by Karin, but by her trusty black servant. The narrator is Mumbai, whose name and role is corrupted by his British bosses, into ÒBombay.Ó GUNBEARER is the picaresque account of a servant to the great explorer captains of British colonial Africa who sought, no matter what the cost in human suffering, the source of the Nile. The irony of the adventure is that the threesome is a weird triangle of deep emotional bonds. All other characters become pawns in the titanic emotional struggles of this threesome. Though this is an often-told story in literature and movies, Merlin now gives it a fresh re-telling. GUNBEARER is author Jan MerlinÕs magnum opus. He turns up his storytelling a notch or two its intensity, message, art, and power. Merlin has been able to combine epic majesty with an Isak Dinesen kind of ambiance, making the length and breadth of the tale instantly accessible and personal. The work is poetic. Segments and sections are dissertations on weather, atmosphere, rain, birds, odors, of the great African trek. The author frequently uses the metaphor of Wind, in a style of African tribal raconteurs. Bombay suggests an Innocent Eye narrator, but all three major characters seem innocent, in hindsight. Not one of them is creative or has a clue on how to solve his own problems. They trudge from one problem to another, seemingly not learning anything. This may be their tragic flaw. MerlinÕs literary power is at its acme in these situations. I picked up immediately on water images: especially the river being like a bathing woman, to mountains of snow, river fever metaphors. Merlin explains how the senses of the native Africans are valued as their "reason." The English seem out of touch, no pun intended, with this world perspective, subsequently are lost in the jungles of Africa. The listening exhortation is elemental in this African symphony, completely alien to the visitors or conquerers. An example of sense deprivation in the English is Òtime.Ó Time makes no sense, and time is apparently meaningless to the Africans . Sensing is also a talent of animals, birds, insects. The use of African words and names (from Hulluk to Hongo) is effective. It reminds me of Anthony Burgess in CLOCKWORK ORANGE. The poetry of the alien tongue is poetry and emblematic of the world it presents. The story is indeed about the inch by inch, mile by mile, corruption of a relationship over the course of a brutal safari. In epical terms there is an irony here, but this is one of the marvellous original qualities of the story. It certainly underscores the point that this is NOT a historical novel in any traditional sense. When Merlin describes the fable of the Source of the Nile. ItÕs a wonderful moment: it is emblematic and metaphoric, and seems to be the real hot-button of the story. GUNBEARER is most reminiscent of Robert Bolt's remarkable screenplay on David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. Jan Merlin manages to combine sweep and majesty with tiny detail. It is a hard match. Because many of the notebooks and collectibles of explorer Burton survive, and Speke's records are ruined, traditional western culture has only one-side of the expedition. For a century and more, the African contribution to these events has been ignored. MerlinÕs personal research in Africa alters that ethnocentric fault. It provides a real sense of Bombay as a cultural voice: providing us with a newer sharper focus to the historical events with which we are familiar, (inaccurately from the famous Spencer Tracy movie to the bad William Harrison novel a few decades ago). Merlin has used his own African researches to reveal the perspective of the native Africans who were the victims of the British explorers. Some chapters sing as much a song of Africa as any Isak Dinesen has told. The pages on Speke's ear infection are fascinating, disturbing, and compelling.. Those chapters feature a decisiveness in the plot and a small bout of contained action. There is a small struggle with wider implications. These moments indicate one is under the spell of a master storyteller. When the reader comes across the slight promotion for Bombay by his captains, one understands completely how evil the racism of the 19th century was and how blind even educated Britons were to it. Speke and Burton, insensitive meglomaniacs, were not worthy of Bombay's loyalty. One is an overt racist, and the other is also class-conscious in a cruel way. Speke strings Bombay along with some pretense of friendship, but he has taken advantage of his worker in a far more painful way. For Burton, the African is a mere tool, useful until he breaks down or can be replaced with a better model. GUNBEARER takes on more impact at the end when Speke's death could be attributed to a mishandled weapon--if it were not suicide. But, is it suicide? The novel grapples with this long-debated historical point, and its answer is more credible than other theories. For the reader this story is as much an epical journey....for its emotional, spiritual, and aesthetic impact. Intimate epics, when ingested, become part of the bloodstream. Putting it down or away is like putting some part of oneself away. To have suffered and travelled with the captains and their sad little companion creates the haunting effect you want to achieve. I shall always be haunted by the stillborn lives of these people. As a cautionary tale for our own lives, GUNBEARER presents us with a message that we may be powerless to adapt to the desperate and trivial vanities in our personal lives. It is the hardest lesson of all to learn. Jan Merlin has presented the story in the form of a masterpiece of literature.

What Jan Merlin, a TV and movie character actor turned Soap Opera scripter and later novelist, has to offer this time around is two short novels (or long short stories), both set in places he knew first-hand. Both seem to take place in the 1970s, though some revision has disguised this. The last and best is set near Hollywood and involves an antique dealer with the most vicious, shrewish wife in all of literature. When, thanks to Bramwell Fletcher and Boris Karloff, the mummy of an ancient Egyptian princess who's smashingly lovely and hot to trot in her revived form attaches herself to him, and a weird rogue's gallery of neighbors, things get funny, indeed. The first story, set in the Philippines, suffers from being neither comically serious nor seriously comic, and giving us no viewpoint character. The high-points are the glimpses of the soft-porn Filipino movie industry. There shoulda been more!

Thorne Smith is my favorite author, so that let's you know where I am coming from. Not since the "Topper" series have I read anything that brought such torrents of laughter to my reading.

The first story in "Crackpots" was set in the Philippines. Having "been there and done that", I recalled the Jitneys, and a lovely world in which there is always a cacophany of sounds and sights.

The second story, "High Priestess", was a blend of New York's "Greenwich" Village, and Hollywood's "Swish Alps", Laurel Canyon.

FUNNY! FUNNY! FUNNY!

I found this book, Crackpots very amusing. How I enjoyed this fine novel. Jan Merlin really captures the nature of Filipino humor in yet another wonderful book. What a creative, intelligent author. Both stories are great reads.

Jan Merlin told me not long ago that he had been fascinated by Africa since the age of 5, when he heard tales of the continent from a sea-roving uncle. I'd have known that without being told, from this unique work of literature, which evokes what it was like to safari in Africa in the mid-19th Century with truly extraordinary vividness.

The author's "voice" allows us to saturate ourselves in the colors, textures, odors, sounds and sensations of a trek through wildest Africa. In about 60 years of reading novels, I've never encountered anything quite like this, in terms of transporting the reader far from the here-and-now, into a long-vanished world whose every feature is alien, yet recognizably human. [Think of the seagoing adventures of Patrick O'Brien, and you still won't quite have the immediacy of the work at hand.]

The novel also tries to do justice to a long-forgotten historical figure, the explorer Speke, whose untimely death and sometimes-vicious rivalry with the much-more-famous Richard Burton have conspired to cheat him of almost all credit for his incredible exploits and endurance.

But the character you won't soon forget is the narrator, another actual historical figure, "Bombay." From the first line of the first page, Bombay offers a vocabulary and a viewpoint totally unique to English literature. Think of Huckleberry Finn, and you won't even be halfway there!

This new edition of a work previously published in 1999 is now split into two volumes and is also far more professionally printed than the earlier edition. Recommended!