I just completed this novel, one of the first TNG books after they stopped numbering novels. The story takes place, as the title suggests, in the Dixon Hill holoprogram. At first I didn't think I was going to like it. I'm not really into mobster stories and this is what it seemed at first. However, it's really not, though mobsters play a role. It's actually a story about a device Geordi and Data are working on to help the Enterprise escape an area of quantum singularities called the Blackness. They are testing the device in the holodeck as malfunctions are increasing, including with the holodeck, and during a malfunction they end up in the Dixon Hill program and a gold ball that is crucial to the device goes missing. Picard (as Dixon Hill and referred to as Dix during the novel), Dr Crusher (referred to as Luscious Bev), Data and Whelan, along with Detective Bell from the program, are on the case to recover the gold ball. Because of the malfunctions the world of Dixon Hill is acting in a bizarre fashion, with a neverending night, weird changes in weather and characters returning from the dead. Almost the entire story is told from the Dixon Hill program, with brief Captain's Logs interspersed within the story to give you the background. I found it a creative way to tell a story, and the holodeck story they are in has real consequences as Hill investigates various crime bosses to find out where the ball has ended up as time is running out. It's one of the reasons I don't give up on a book if at first I don't think I'll like it. I found in this book it ended up different from what I expected and I ended up enjoying it. The book isn't all that clear as to the timeframe. The captain's logs due not provide a stardate. Memory Alpha lists it as taking place in 2377, which would place the crew on the Enterprise E between Insurrection and Nemesis.
I really liked this book being a Dixon Hill novel I reread it last year and really enjoyed reading it again. There's a Dixon Hill story in one of the Strange New worlds books I really like too.
The best thing about this novel is its cover art. Love that! Did you realise that this one was planned as Pocket's second serialized story, with the 12 chapters to appear in the back of the monthly releases over a year, just as "Starfleet: Year One" did? While I read the individual chapters of "Starfleet: Year One", it did feel very disjointed and worked much better when it came out as a MMPB (with extra scenes). "A Hard Rain" may have worked better as a serial?
A Hard Rain was a pain to read as a novel. Way too much recapping at the beginning of each chapter. Useful for something printed in monthly installments, but it got on my nerves as a single book. I wondered why some of that hadn’t been edited out, but as I recall it was already shorter than the average Star Trek novel, and editing it to improve flow and reduce repetition would have shortened it more.
The Dixon Hill stuff is my favorite from the holodeck, so I was most disappointed to find A Hard Rain unreadable. It's in my car. That is, I drive around with it with the hope that the next time I pick it up, I'll get past page 3.
I remember being disappointed it wasn't a straight Dixon Hill pastiche. I think that would have been more fun than working Picard and the holodeck in, though maybe a harder sell.
Love these review of older novels. Keep it up. It's nice to discover or be reminded of these books. Sounds interesting. I'm a fan of Philp Marlowe stories so it's fun to see Picard play around in this world. Saw pictures online of the Picard exhibition that had mock copies of Dixon Hill books. Agree with what others here have said, might work better as a full blown Dixon Hill novel. Although that might be too close to the works of Chandler and Hammett.
I really like this Dixon Hill novel I wish they'd release a few more Dixon Hill novels like they had at San Diego comicon for the Picard Museum.display.
[QUOTE="Saul, post: 13045055, member: 1660" Agree with what others here have said, might work better as a full blown Dixon Hill novel. Although that might be too close to the works of Chandler and Hammett.[/QUOTE] I'm kind of amazed they haven't done one, we did get a Captain Proton books, so they have done that kind of stuff before.
I haven't. For some reason that one fell through the cracks and I don't have it. I'll have to get a copy somewhere (I prefer hardcopy so I'll have to find it used somewhere--though I'm not even sure if this one is available as an e-book anyway). I've heard of it but initially dismissed it. I wasn't a huge fan of the Captain Proton episodes of Voyager. But since I read "A Hard Rain" and the X-Men Crossover TNG novel, both of which I didn't think I'd care for until I read them and found them both pretty good (I'm not much into mobsters or comic book series), I might give the Captain Proton book a try. And it's probably only one of a very few Star Trek novels I don't yet have so why not .
Amazon has the paperback, and the e-book is available to buy from Amazon, Google, and Barnes & Noble. My local library's Overdrive system doesn't own it, but it does come up as an "not owned" so it might be available through other libraries.
I'm kind of amazed they haven't done one, we did get a Captain Proton books, so they have done that kind of stuff before.[/QUOTE] We also got that Sam Cogley Mystery that had the red ink on the edges of the pages as a throw back to 1960’sPerry Mason books: The Case Of The Colonist’s Corpse.
I always imagined Dixon Hill as a bit more lurid and pulpish, more like Mickey Spillane than Hammett. Max Allan Collins could write that sort of thing in his sleep. It's been about twenty years since I read the Captain Proton book. I remember generally enjoying it... or at least, not being irritated by it. The interesting bit I recall was a letter in the book from Benny Russell to the "magazine" that the Captain Proton book is a replica of.
I'm confused by the idea of Captain Proton as a pulp magazine character, since canonically he was a movie serial character. Was the idea that the serials were based on the pulps? Well, a quick trip to Wikipedia tells me that there were at least a few real-life serials based on pulp characters like the Shadow and the Spider, although the SF/fantasy serials were more often based on comics or radio characters.
Buck Rogers was a couple stories in Amazing Stories (1928 & 1929) before it was a comic strip (1929) before it was a movie serial (1939). So the original basis is pretty damn pulpy.
Damian's description of this one in the OP makes this sound awesome, and today I happily came across a copy in really good shape today. Snagged it! As far as the breakdown of prose pulp fiction versus cliffhanger serials, I never gave it much thought how much or which specific media fed into the other. I've mostly just figured that the movie serials and the prose pulp fiction were counterparts of each other.