Two O'Clock, Eastern Wartime

Rating:
Summary: Great Period Piece
Review: I agree that the mystery in this novel was not particulary compelling. However, it is a great period piece. I very much enjoyed the authors portrayal of the era--the immediate pre-WW2 period--and the setting--the golden age of radio. A fun read.

Rating:
Summary: briefly
Review: I agree with almost all of the reviewers in points of fact.
- Good story, you care about characters.
- Not the best consttructed mystery evbery presented.
- Needed a better editor to pull the book together - it is 20% too long.
- Fascinating detail about old time radio added to the book.

Rating:
Summary: Dunning Makes A Great Return
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: More historical fiction than thriller
Review: I bought this in an airport because of the cover reviews that was a "gripping thriller that you couldn't put down". I found it instead to be an interesting retrospective of the days when radio was the main entertainment media. It was very interesting to go behind the scene to see what it took to put on gripping radio dramas and serials. It was a little unbelievable that the hero, Jordan Ten Eyck, aka Jack Dulaney, could come up with full blown radio scripts at the rate of one a day, but suspending your belief there, he is a likable hero. I decided to finish the novel despite some slow going sections and was glad I did.

What this is not, is a suspenseful thriller. There is some suspense woven in between the many pages of historical radio detail, but a thriller it is not. I enjoy some historical or subject matter background to my thrillers and mysteries--eg the racing stories that are part of Dick Francis' mysteries. However, with this book, there is about 100 pages too much detail for it to be considered a gripping story. So forewarned is forearmed--if you are looking more for historical fiction on the byegone radio days, this is the book for you. If you want a gripping thriller, look elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: Merely "okay"
Review: I enjoyed the Janeway novels but always felt that Dunning's inexperience shows through in a certain boyishness. "Oh boy, now I get to make my character do THIS" and "now my character gets a SNAPPY COMEBACK." Much of this is present in "Two O'Clock, Eastern Wartime," which is annoying, but more annoying is that Dunning's real purpose seems to have been to write a novel about old time radio. The plot is contrived--almost self-confessedly so. (There's a scene in which the main character writes a contrived little story about a guy at loose ends on the seaside, an enigmatic woman...same stuff we have in the current novel.)
Some of the lingo seems off--would people on this period have used the term "pop culture," for instance? My final analysis of Dunning: He's not as clever as he thinks we think he is. But with Janeway, he's a good read. In Two O'Clock, Eastern Wartime, I find myself "tuning out."

Rating:
Summary: A true page turner
Review: I found Two Oclock, Eastern Wartime an enthralling novel. It had everything to be a true page-turner. It had characters you cared about and were absorbed by (and admired in the case of the hero and heroine); ambience aplenty on the New Jersey shore, but also a sininster ambience as to locale and relations; terrific writing; a thriller of the type that makes you hate to put the book down; the whole radio melieu as you yourself might experience it; and, if you're a writer yourself, a good insight into that avenue of creative endeavor. John Dunning's intellect and inventiveness are first class!

Rating:
Summary: Where was the edtior?!?
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Escape to Golden Age of Radio and Wartime Mystery
Review: I Just Finished reading John Dunning new novel "Two O'Clock Eastern WarTime". With All apologies to those have read it, I found it must read for any Old Time radio buff. The novel is set in 1942, and tells the tale of a Drifter named Jack Dulaney who looking for a lost love becomes involved in a local New Jersey radio station struggling to survive in WWII America. Dulaney while on the trail of the killer since leaving California becomes intangled in workings of the N.J Radio station and becomes its chief scriptwriter. The bulk of the book concerns Dulaney involvement in the Radio station attempts to leave the "Network" and produce its own original programming including a serial, controversial antiwar shows, patrioic war bond specials, and show meant to be "Destination Freedom" that goes by another name in the novel. While Dulaney brecomes involved in the Radio station he learns to write, direct and eventual produce his own shows while subtly solving the dark mystery that lies in the background.

I had one reservation that I found with the book was the reading of 90's Moral and Political sensibilities into 1940s characters a bit troubling. Having said that I still found well worth the read. Mr. Dunning vividly brings the setting to life. You can almost feel youself there on the soundstage the actors take the microphone or the band on stage finishes a tune for the war bond show. One particular aspect the book brings to life is process of script writing a radio show or closet thing I am likely to experience since it all happened before my time. One thing that particular interest to me as Old Time Radio fan was in trying to guess who he based each character on assuming he did. One final thought I noticed was a small plot device in the book bore a striking resemblance to an 1946 Radio episode of the show :THE WHISTLER. Although a Non-OTR buff would hardly know this. I think the book would be of less interest to non-otr fans however because the setting: the workings of radio station in 1942 wartime America plays a dominant part of the novel to the point that the ending while suspenseful is of lesser importance to the reader.

Despite any Reservations this book is a MUST for any OTR fan.

Rating:
Summary: Long and complex historical mystery is a bit murky
Review: I like mysteries. I like spy stories. I like historical novels. I like reading about World War 2. Though I didn't know much about 1940's radio, I enjoyed reading about it too. Funny thing though, given that I like all of this, the sum of it, in the case of Two O'Clock Eastern Wartime, wasn't very much fun for me. I'm not sure why, though I think I can guess parts of it.

For one thing, the plot sort of meanders along. The main character starts out in jail in California, but you get flashbacks to his life earlier, working on racetracks tending horses. He escapes from jail, and then he journeys to New Jersey, with a detour to Pennsylvania, where he finds a murdered friend. Once in New Jersey, he gets a job at a radio station, and stays there for the rest of the story, trying to figure out why an old girlfriend of his is acting so strangely. The plot takes long detours itself, into the life and culture of the radio station, and they are interesting, but they distract from the spy/mystery plot, making it almost impenetrable.

A further difficulty is names. The main character, Jack Dulaney, decides he can't use his real name at the station, so for most of the book he's Jordan Ten Eyck (he made the name up out of characters in books he's admired). Turns out Holly Carnahan, the girl he's chasing, is known locally as Holly O'Hara. The author refers to Dulaney as Dulaney, or as Jordan, pretty much interchangeably throughout the book, and she's Miss O'Hara long enough that you forget what her real name is.

And lastly, for whatever reason, the mystery itself was rather unsatisfying for me. The plot turned out to be less than the sum of it's parts, and so did the book, I'm afraid.

Rating:
Summary: Radio Drama Noir, with a little interference...
Review: I liked Dunning's Cliff Janeway novels, and I liked this one, although I would have preferred another Janeway, given a choice. Still, Dunning's mysteries always rise above the grocery-store paperback level, with more literary aspirations.

The book is a WWII-era noir fiction historical mystery with a tie-in to old time radio drama when it wasn't quite yet old time. There are mysterious disappearances, hints of subterfuge and espionage, references to historical atrocities that have been covered-up or ignored, a few surprising scenes that are graphically macabre, and some sexual explicitness that adds nothing to the story. Dunning is a very good writer, with occasional flashes of brilliance, and the book is close enough to a great book that I feel compelled to express my frustration at its foibles.

Eastern Wartime has a compelling mystery at its heart, at least it starts out that way. But it seems to get thinned out along the way, only to be resuscitated at the end. Too much sidetracking with the goings-on at a certain radio station, to the point some of the mystery atmosphere lapses for pages at a time. A flaw with all Dunning's characters is that they appear to be emotionally stilted, unable to access their feelings at times, unable to sustain emotion beyond a paragraph or two, at others. Which takes something away from their otherwise human complexity. And many of the characters are painted so vaguely that I couldn't remember who they were or what they were doing there.

The "historical" atmosphere is weak, and unlike Caleb Carr's Alienist (with which it is compared on the jacket blurb), I would frequently forget that the story was taking place in another era. Another minor irritation is that Dunning can't resist taking pot-shots at the Bible and at religious faith. I'll line up with the rest who detest religious hypocrisy and duplicity in the name of God, but I resent being proselytized to the secular humanist cause. Again, these little forays add nothing to the book, and only serve to weaken the story line.

Still, the mystery kept me guessing, and the sense of comeraderie and creativity was almost palpable in the radio drama scenes, which comprise a large part of the story. A character named Anne Riordan makes a cameo appearance, in a nod to Ray Chandler's Philip Marlowe books, which have clearly influenced Dunning. I'm not sure if 4 stars is too many, or two few. It is, when all is said and done, a very good book. I just hope Dunning can raise the bar a notch or two for his next effort, (hopefully a Cliff Janeway novel), as he's certainly shown he's capable of it.