Customer Reviews

Two O'Clock, Eastern Wartime : A Novel

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I am so fortunate that I acquired a signed first edition of this book, because I will treasure it for years to come. In his newest, Dunning crafts a story of a writer, caught up in a mystery due to a lost love. Stumbling through America in the war years, he manages to find a way to bring the truth to life, but along the way he finds himself in the broadcast radio game, and it is there that his talent truly comes alive. Dunning tops the story off with a coda that leaves the reader guessing as to whom Jack/Jordan finally spends the rest of his life with.

I haven't given up on the return of Cliff Janeway, the "Bookman" and hope that Dunning will return to his hero in the future, but "Two O'Clock Eastern Wartime" is an outstanding read.

Remembering my parents & grandparents talking about sitting around the radio for hours to listen, learn and be entertained, I always wondered about the attraction - Dunning has helped put that in perspective by giving the reader a sense of the magic that was radio during the war years in the 30's and 40's. Obviously an expert on the topic, he wraps his knowledge around a well written mystery with a hero you can really care about and an interesting cast of bit players.

I am a mystery/thriller buff, and don't often come across truly great writing - the thrill is the mystery itself, the element of surprise and sometimes disaster. Dunning can do it all. He can share a mystery with his readers but the quality of his own writer's craftsmanship appears throughout the novel, and makes it come alive..."He dreamed that there was no war. Got up at three and exploded into his work, as if the answer to everything lay in some unwritten script still hidden away in his mind..."; Dunning captures the thrill and the fulfillment of being a great writer and shares it with all of us who have never known that rush.

Please read "Two O'clock Eastern Wartime", you will have no regrets.

Dunning, where have you been all my life? From the very first words of this book, you know that you are in the hands of a master. This is the most beautifully written mystery I've ever read!

The pace is leisurely, but that's all to the good. By taking its time, the book gives you the chance to really get to know the main character, Jack/Jordan, and he is one of the most compelling characters in fiction. 1940s America and life in a small-town radio station are beautifully evoked. What impressed me most is that, unlike many historical novels which seem to be a frozen slice in time with no antecedents, this book has enough references to culture and events in the 1930s that the wartime in which the book is set makes sense and has context. Jack himself, who has bummed around race tracks doing menial jobs like horse walking, seems very much a man of the 1930s Depression, rootless and scraping by, but looking for something to cling to.

The mystery itself is satisfyingly complex. In fact, through most of the book, you're not even sure what the mystery is! Who is after Jack and why?

I was sad to reach the end of the book, because I wanted to spend more time in this world.

The book gets 5 stars only because 6 are unavailable. This magnicicent recreation of a time, a place, and an atmosphere that will seem as foreign to most younger readers as the sands of Mars is a marvelous achievement. Plot-wise, it is a credible mystery that grips the reader from page one. But it is so much more than that. The book's depiction of the early days of radio (which, alas, were also, unbeknownst to either the protagonists or the real world, the beginning of the last days of radio)are so detailed and involving that they may bring the art form back! The characters are real, complex, credible, and, rare for a thriller (or ANY book nowadays), people you get to know as well as your own, disfunctional, family. A few months ago there was a higly hyped tome called "The Advocate" which took place during WWII. It was awful. This book recreates that time, the people, the country, in such a way as to almost make one sad one wasn't part of it. And those radio stories! If my words don't move you to read this, as a thriller, as an historical piece, as a character study, well... buy the darn thing and make up your own words! If you do, you will!

Dunning's new novel reads well and has a great setting. His depiction of radio days during WWII is detailed and absorbing, so much so that the rather hackneyed mystery plot was more of an intrusion than an attraction. Drifter Jack Mulaney AKA Jordan Ten Eyck follows clues to discover who's been murdering people connected to station WHAR. He's lured into this investigation because his almost/former sweetheart is involved--her father was a victim. Turns out Jack is an excellent radio writer, and he settles into the job of radio station savior. Unfortunately for the mystery, what the reader really cares about is Jack's role as savior of the station, rather than his murder investigation. The murder mystery is hampered by thinly developed minor characters, so much so that when the murderer was revealed, I could barely recall the character's connection to the story.

I found myself wanting to read more about the characters and their connections to the radio business, perhaps because the killer's victims were all done in before the book starts--and the mild suspense about the survival of the love interest character Holly Carnahan AKA O'Hara didn't really seem inportant.

Not a bad read, and an ambitious attempt, but not up to the caliber of Booked To Die or Bookman's Wake. People who liked the American Movie Classics show Remember WENN will like this book.

Half paean to old-time radio, half murder mystery, this overly melodramatic WWII-era set novel lurches along for far too long before petering out, exhausted with itself. I've enjoyed Dunning's "Bookman" series, and I like historically set mysteries, so picking this up seemed like a no-brainer. But Dunning overextends himself with this one. The story revolves around Jack Dulaney, a down-and-out racetrack horse-walker who gets in a fight that lands him in jail. His buddy helps to spring him from a work gang, but is then killed. This is the catalyst for Jack's incredibly complicated search for the killer and reason behind the murder. The trail leads him to a New Jersey beach town and the radio station where his buddy used to work as an actor. There, further disappearances and deaths are revealed, including that of Carnahan, the father of the woman he pined for years before. As it happens, the woman is also in town, working as a nightclub singer under an assumed name. Jack manages to get work at the station as a writer, allowing him to poke around and try to get to the bottom of everything (not to mention rekindle his old flame).

Here is where the book starts to have real problems. Namely, all the detail about old-time radio production is far more fascinating than the murders. I'm not particularly (nor are most readers likely to be) interested in how dramatic radio shows were put together back in the '30s and '40s, but Dunning makes the station come alive and does a fascinating job of detailing the inner workings. From the scripting, to the management, the actors, the sound effects, it's all very well dramatized. So much so, in fact, that it's hard for the reader to care very much about the deaths of some characters met only very briefly or in flashbacks. The station's attempt to create original dramatic programming that pushed the limits of what was considered acceptable material--such as a scripted serial about black Americans, an anti-war prison camp series, and soforth--ends up being much more interesting. Unfortunately, the story eventually leaves the radio setting (via a lame piece of misdirection lifted from Hamlet) to dive into the world of German spies in America, the Irish Republic Army, and all manner of melodrama.

The melodrama is enhanced by a certain thinness to the characters. The protagonist is an especially poorly drawn hero figure with altogether too keen a resemblance to the hero of Dunning's "Bookman" series. He's one of those all-purpose strong, capable men. Street-fighting? No problem. Writing a critically well-received Steinbeck/Dos Passosesque novel? No problem. Escaping a work gang? No problem. Master writing radio drama overnight? No problem. Expert tracking through the woods? No problem. When the hero of a story turns out to be exceptional at everything, the whole story is diluted. Beyond Jack, the cast of characters is so large that Dunning doesn't really have the time or space to develop any of them in any meaningful way. It's not generally a good thing when the villain in a mystery is a character you can barely remember being in the story. This is a pity, because there are a number of characters with potential, and the old-time radio setting is certainly well done. As a historical novel about a small group of people striving in a creative field, it works fairly well--in no small part due to the subsequent total demise of the world depicted in the book. Just don't expect to pick this up and find yourself immersed in a thriller.

Dunning has taken us out of the book shop (Booked to Die, The Bookman's Wake) and transported us to the world of radio drama during World War II. The station itself (WHAR) becomes another important character in the cast of many characters. Before many pages are turned, you get to know a whole "family" of radio actors, producers, and technicians. The central character in the story is Jack who has followed Holly Carnahan to New Jersey in order to help her discover what has happened to her father. In the process he gets a job at WHAR and finds his niche as a writer of radio shows. As Jack pursues the clues to the disappearance of Carnahan, he discovers several other disappearances that have occured and searches to discover the link between them. The story jumps between his attempt to solve the mystery and his growing career in radio with the romance with Holly finally being realized. It makes for a good read although at times it seems a little convoluted with too many political subplots related to the disappearance and murders. It is well worth the read and we learn a lot about an era where radio was the medium. If you like a good mystery that teaches you something while making you think, you'll enjoy reading "Two O'Clock Eastern Wartime".

Two O'Clock, Eastern Wartime is great historical fiction (circa 1942) with a page-turning plot. In fact, the people, place and plot are so well written that I found myself in constant conflict - read slowly and absorb it all or read fast to learn what comes next. It was a thrilling read and now I want to reread the book to see how much I missed along the way in my haste to turn the pages.

I would describe this book as merely good. Better than much of the mystery fare out there today but not up to the standards of the Cliff Janeway novels. I am a fan of old time radio and the aspects of this book that dealt with radio as it was ( or perhaps as it should be) I found fascinating.Take away the radio aspects and you are left with 50 page mystery with none of the twists and turns of " Booked to Die" or " The Bookman's Wake". There were so many perifery characters that it was hard to keep track of them all at times. I found myself going back to read sections of the book to find out who some of the people were.Maybe if I had read it all in one sitting it would have made a difference, but I read it over a few days. The ending was not nearly as tight as the Janeway books. In previous Dunning books the villains were important characters.I found I didn't care that the villain turned out to be ______ .This next line is somewhat of a spoiler, but of all the interesting characters in the book it seems a shame that the villain turned out to be who it was.

I have been a fan of Mr. Dunning since his first book "Tune into Yesterday" came out in the 70s. The two "Book" volumes were marvelous reads and fueled my hopes that "2:00" would be a captivating read. And it was, at least when Mr. Dunning concerned himself with the radio station. As for the mystery segments...well, it's a mystery to me why his editor allowed the book to go to press with far too many characters that blend together, a plot that often made no sense, a killer who the reader wasn't even sure he/she knew, and a bizarre tie-in to the Boer War, Nazis, and the IRA. Not to mention a vast expanse of dunes and ghost towns that always seemed to be in walking distance of the radio station. Shame that all this book needed was some reality slaps from a good edtior to make it great. I'm sure Mr. Dunning will return to form next round.

In 1942 Southern California, writer Jack Dulaney loves the untouchable Holly Carnahan. Jack struggles with producing a second novel, earning money by walking horses at the track. When Holly flees to Regina Beach, New Jersey in search of her missing dad, Jack follows out of concern for his beloved's safety.

In the Jersey south shore community, Jack lands a job as a writer at radio station WHAR. He soon realizes that he is quite good at cranking out well-written radio dramas. Perhaps it is because of his writing skills that allow Jack to notice the strange behavior on the part of WHAR employees. He finds sudden disappearances as mysterious as the disappearance of Holly's dad and certain links to the Nazis. Jack worries that Holly is in danger while she is concerned that her actions brought danger to him.

TWO O'CLOCK, EASTERN WARTIME is a fabulous historical fiction novel that vividly brings to life a small East Coast community during World War II. The historical perspective, especially that of the powerful role of radio as a forerunner of television, is brilliantly depicted. The mystery stays subtlety in the shadows, truly enhancing John Dunning's homage to the communication role radio played during wartime. Fans of World War II dramas will find Mr. Dunning's novel endearing for its resplendent account of a bygone era.

Harriet Klausner