Fiction, Reviews

‘The Perfect Lawyer,’ by Gregg Bell

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Icarus “Ike” Thompson, hero of The Perfect Lawyer, used to be a legal superstar in Chicago. He defended high-profile criminal defendants and usually won. Then he ran up against Ursula Rush, a hard-driving prosecutor who not only beat him but humiliated him in a case in which he was personally invested. Overwhelmed and shamed, he retreated to a leafy suburb, where he now practices property law. When he interviews Abby Blum, an attractive young lawyer from Colorado, as a new partner, and she brings up criminal law, he shuts her down and almost rejects her application. But she persists, and he takes her on.

Then “Father K.” shows up. He’s a Catholic priest and a well-known social crusader. He wants Ike to defend Mia Hendrickson. a media sensation, a mother accused of setting her house on fire and burning her two children to death. She’s already been tried and convicted in the court of public opinion. Ike wants nothing to do with the case, but we just know Father K. will get through to him in the end.

Then follows a tale of increasing drama as Ike and Abby take on what looks like a hopeless case, only gradually realizing what kind of power and corruption they’re facing. And at the prosecutor’s table, once again, will be none other than Ursula Rush.

If I were teaching a novel writing class, and a student had submitted A Perfect Lawyer as a final project, I would give them an A. The book is well-plotted, generally well written, and gripping. The prose could have been better – occasionally an overwritten line shows up: “He was burning with their insolent intimidation.” But overall the writing is good, and way better than a lot I see these days. The dialogue is sometimes kind of bookish, and could use some polishing. But I’d tell the author he showed great promise and had produced a publishable work.

I was a little disappointed that some plot threads were left loose at the end, but no doubt the next volume in the series will pick them up. I almost mistook this book for Christian fiction, because I noticed no profanity (kudos for that).

All in all, The Perfect Lawyer, though less than perfect, is pretty good.

Reading, Reviews

Profoundly flattered

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Tonight, I brag. In a modest, spiritual way, of course.

The latest issue of my church body’s magazine, The Lutheran Ambassador, contains a review of my novel Hailstone Mountain. The writer of the review compares it to biblical narratives, saying:

He manages to make the characters both likable and realistic, simultaneously saint and sinner, wrestling against evil around them and wrestling within themselves. Their lives are raw, sometimes offensively so, but also fully human. Like the Bible, the books are not rated G, but I would rate them five stars because somehow Walker manages to make God the hero and Savior rather than the human characters.

I’m not sure whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that it never occurred to me before that God is the hero of the Erling books. But having that said is about the highest accolade I can think of for them.

It should be mentioned, in full disclosure, that the author of the review, Pastor Brian Lunn of Upsala, Minnesota, is a friend of mine.

But still.

[Addendum: Dave Lull informs me (to my astonishment) that this review can actually be seen online, here: Lutheran Ambassador May 2025 by Lutheran Ambassador – Issuu ]

Fiction, Reviews

‘Drowning My Sorrows,’ by Martyn Goodger

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The other day I reviewed Biding My Time, the first novel of Martyn Goodger’s Alan Gadd series. I was highly impressed by the originality of the concept and the quality of the prose.

Having now finished the second book (I don’t think there will be more), I fear I have to dampen my praise a little. Drowning My Sorrows was certainly an original book, but it left me baffled as to the purpose of the whole exercise.

To recap, Alan Gadd is an English lawyer. In the previous book he was working for a large Cambridge law firm. His legal expertise was top-flight, but his utter lack of social skills made him much disliked among his colleagues. His suspicious nature enabled him to detect the fact that a co-worker’s death, apparently a suicide, was in fact murder, and he was nearly killed himself in uncovering the truth. But his methods were so underhanded and cowardly that he got no credit.

As Drowning My Sorrows begins, Alan has lost that job, and is now working in the legal department of a not-very-prestigious university in Cambridgeshire. Once again he regards his colleagues and superiors as inferior to himself. He obsesses over their sexual lives, while feigning moral superiority even as he lusts after a female assistant who’s not interested in him. Once again he is universally disliked by his co-workers.

But part of his job is reviewing university business contracts, and in those he detects some genuine problems. A university-held patent is being sold off to a private corporation at what seems to him an absurdly low price. A superior appears to have granted contracts to personal cronies. Alan’s characteristic response is to set one of his underlings to asking questions, while he himself stalks people and sends anonymous e-mails to get his enemies into trouble. All the while congratulating himself on his ethical superiority.

Then someone gets killed, and once again Alan will find himself facing death.

One weakness of Biding My Time, which I neglected to mention in my review of that book, was a slow start. Author Goodger delights in setting the stage and giving us time to get to know our narrator (I won’t say hero). In this book that problem is even worse – we’re half-way through the story before the murder happens. Frankly, it doesn’t take nearly that long to get one’s fill of Alan Gadd’s company. There were many points when I was ready to drop the book in frustration, and I’m pretty sure a lot of other readers won’t be as patient as I was.

I frequently wondered, as I read, exactly how I was supposed to take the Alan Gadd stories. Sometimes I thought I was taking them too seriously – that they were meant as dark comedies and I was supposed to be laughing as Alan, again and again, falls into pits he has dug for himself through his gormless manipulations. But the ending of this book – admittedly an unexpected one – convinced me that probably wasn’t the purpose. There were moments of sympathy for Alan – we learn that he was bullied as a child and that he had concerned parents who didn’t know how to help him – but he was impossible to like, and difficult to care about.

So, taken all in all, I can’t recommend these books very highly. The author has considerable talent, but I wish he’d put his hand to something more sympathetic.

Music

Sunday Singing: Death Is Ended!

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One more Easter song today, and I thought I’d shared this one with you last year, but I must have kept it to myself. This one isn’t going to be in your hymnal.

James Ward is a musician and churchman in my city and denomination. “Death Is Ended,” written in 2011, is a marvelous celebration of Jesus’s crushing death with his resurrection. The repeated chorus goes “Death is ended. Death is ended. Death is shallowed up in victory.”

“Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?’” (John 11:25-26 ESV)

Fiction, Reviews

‘Biding My Time,’ by Martyn Goodger

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Occasionally, one runs across the dramatic device of the “unreliable narrator” in a mystery book. It’s an intriguing strategy for fooling readers, and a challenging one for a writer. The device of the unlikeable narrator is even less common, and a difficult one to pull off. First-time author Martyn Goodger has fulfilled that challenge in style in his mystery, Biding My Time, I am happy to report.

Alan Gadd is a commercial lawyer in a large firm in Cambridge, England. He is intelligent, meticulous and hard-working. He hopes to get a partnership on the basis of his legal expertise. However, there are other expectations in the job – one is supposed to get along with one’s colleagues and to fish for new clients outside work hours. Alan faces challenges in those areas.

Because the fact is, Alan is a jerk. He is arrogant, fiercely competitive, suspicious, vindictive, and a sneak. Other people barely exist for him – he only thinks of them in terms of how they affect his own interests. I suspect he may be on the autism scale, but the author doesn’t say that – quite correctly, because Alan is the narrator, and he possesses zero self-awareness.

Alan had a romantic relationship with Helen, one of his colleagues, until 10 weeks ago when she broke it off. He still obsesses over her, of course, and hates the other partner she’s dating now. This impels him to pay close attention to what she’s doing and who she sees – which will become important when she is suddenly the center of a police inquiry.

Mostly in order to try to catch out co-workers he resents, Alan sets himself to investigating the crime. Which will lead him, by sideways steps, to a truth that will put his life in danger.

Biding My Time was both fascinating and horrifying for this reader. It was fascinating to read such a well-conceived, well-written, and original story. And it was horrifying to identify as strongly as I did with a narrator whom I did not like one bit.

I don’t recall ever reading a book quite like Biding My Time, and I recommend it highly. Cautions for some sexual themes.

Uncategorized

Dopamine junky

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I’m going to bore you again tonight with another update on my audiobook exertions. Today’s session was okay, but yesterday’s was remarkable. I talked about it on Basefook, but I feel like expanding on the subject here, and I’m between books to review.

What happened yesterday was that I was working on Chapter 3 of Troll Valley. Since I’m sure you’re familiar with that classic work of the imagination, you’ll surely remember how Miss Margit, the fairy godmother, tells Chris the story of The Twelve Wild Ducks.

What I realized as I was reading was that I was having a good time. It was fun.

I don’t have a lot of fun anymore (never did, to be honest). But one of the things I’ve always enjoyed most – and gotten least opportunity to do – is acting. The peculiar convolutions of my psychology have made me one of those natural actors who are naturally shy (there are more of them than you may think. Henry Fonda was terribly shy. Audrey Hepburn was too, and Meryl Streep is, according to a quick internet search). Some of them had (or have) stage fright too, something I have mercifully been spared.

But still, audiobooks may be just the medium for me. I can do them all by myself, and act my little heart out. The Twelve Wild Ducks gave me an opportunity to do both my Scandinavian accent (which is pretty good, I think) and my English accent (passable, at least in small portions).

Anyway, I had a ball yesterday.

And I thought about how I’ve wrestled with this project. Dealing with my crippling fear of the recording software. Working at it doggedly, a little each day, as much as my insecurities permitted. Incremental progress. How long have I been at this?

And now I’m starting to have fun. I took a risk, and now I’ve received a small reward.

Jordan Peterson talks frequently about taking small steps. If you can’t clean your room, clean a drawer. If you can’t do that, dust a shelf. Begin small and escalate. Supposedly, as you do more and more each day, some gland will excrete little shots of dopamine into your system, making you feel happy.

Frankly, this has never been my experience. There was a period in my life when I worked hard at trying to be more social. Smile (very hard for me). Speak to strangers (harder still). I was seeing a counselor at the time, and he cheered my efforts on. I’m pretty sure that helped. But then I moved away, and lost that support. I continued trying to be outgoing in my new environment, but gradually I ran out of gas. The little dopamine shots that were supposed to reward my efforts failed to show up. My emotional bank ran out of funds and I reverted to shyness.

And then there was music. As a kid I took 6 years of piano lessons. I never really got better. I hit a sort of glass ceiling. Later in life I spent about 3 years trying to learn guitar. Smack up against the same ceiling. Steady, incremental work, but no progress. No payoff. I assumed I must have a dopamine blockage.

But at last I’ve achieved a thing. In my seventh decade, I’ve learned a life lesson.

I always was a late bloomer.

I may be ready to marry by the time I’m in my 80s.

Fiction, Non-fiction

Amazon’s House of David Entertains, Could Repel Some

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When I first saw that Amazon was releasing a series on the life of David, I thought I should watch it to let you know how bad it is. Those are our expectations in 2025, aren’t they? Having watched four out of eight episodes, I can say it’s a good, solid show, but being also a biblical show means it will likely push some viewers away, because many Christians want biblical stories just so. When dramatizing a biblical story, writers have to make creative decisions that will naturally appear to deviate from the text because the Bible wasn’t written for full dramatization.

The first episode will provoke Bible-lovers more than the next three. In fact, I saw an interview with Michael Iskander, who depicts David very well, and he said his mother raised the question of biblical accuracy daily. The series attempts to head off such complaints by opening with a notice about creative liberties and historical accuracy. It essentially says we can’t all agree on every detail when telling stories like this.

Season one of House of David covers 1 Samuel 15-17, introducing King Saul at the time he fails to obey the Lord in completely destroying the Amalekites and framing the season in terms of David’s battle with Goliath. That framing is one of the things that sounds off. A child asks us, “Can one stone change the course of history?” Well, the stone wasn’t the one who changed things.

David is introduced as a disfavored son of Jesse, disfavored because his mother was an outcast and not married to Jesse, whose first wife must have died at some point. I got the impression this woman, Nitzevet, had married Jesse, but calling David a bastard would contradict that. Presenting David as an outcast comes from Jewish tradition, which says David describes his upbringing in Psalm 69. “I have become a stranger to my brothers” is one description (v 8). But David being a bastard or Jesse being shunned by his community for having a dishonored concubine is not the traditional view.

As many characters are introduced in the first episode so is a lion who threatens Jesse’s land. The beast is a divisive point between father and son; Jesse says he handled it before, but it has returned (because there’s only ever one evil lion) and David defiantly decides to handle it himself. Why do the heroes always have to rebel against their parents to begin their path to greatness? Can we be done with this cliché?

In this part of the narrative, the writers introduce an odd maxim that is not repeated beyond this first episode (at least for the first half). Jesse is teaching his family about Moses and Joshua and God’s command to “be strong and courageous.” He summarizes that command as “Fear is the enemy. Fear is the thief.” This is what David repeats when he seeks out the lion, and it just sounds secular. Why doesn’t he say something like, “Be strong and courageous for the Lord will given your enemies into your hands”? David, Jesse, Jonathan, and Samuel are depicted as the most expressively faithful characters in these episodes, so why can’t David something about confidence in God instead a parody of the famous line from Dune.

I do appreciate how attractive Michal is–I have sympathy for her. I’ll be surprised if seasons two depicts how David’s womanizing and wife-collecting hurts her. They’ll probably gloss over that part. I also appreciate everything they do with Jonathan. He’s the solid, righteous one in the royal family, though Michal appears to be equally devout.

There’s also a bit of drama involving the Philistines that is utterly cliché, but we shall not speak of it.

I’ve enjoyed the series so far. I’ll let you know what I think of the rest of it soon.

Photo by Lukáš Kačaliak on Unsplash

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Big Sleep,’ by Raymond Chandler

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Her smile was tentative, but could be persuaded to be nice.

Recently I watched an old interview with Andrew Klavan in which he cited The Big Sleep, the first Philip Marlowe novel (1939), which he admires very much. He mentioned how he adopted Marlowe as a literary hero when he read the first scene of this book, where the detective enters the palatial Sternwood mansion. Above the door he sees a stained glass window depicting a knight attempting to free a maiden tied to a tree. Marlowe doesn’t think the knight is trying as hard as he could, and thinks that if he lived there he’d have to climb up himself and help out.

That, Klavan says (and I agree), is the key to Philip Marlowe’s character. He’s a knight out of romance, plunked down in the 20th Century where he has no place. His adventures involve him in many compromises, but he strives to keep some honor.

Even when the fair maidens don’t really deserve rescuing, as is the case in The Big Sleep. Old General Sternwood, confined to a wheelchair, has summoned Marlowe because he has received blackmail demands related to his daughter Carmen. Carmen is flighty, promiscuous, and not very bright. He also mentions a man named Rusty Regan, ex-husband to his other daughter Vivian. The general liked Rusty, but the man has disappeared. He hopes he’s all right. Marlowe intuits (correctly) that the general isn’t really much concerned over the blackmail; he’s trying to work up to asking Marlowe to locate Rusty.

Soon Marlowe will be a near-witness to a murder, with Carmen Sternwood present (high on drugs). Then the body will disappear. And Marlowe will find himself looking for Rusty Regan after all – not because he cares about the Sternwood daughters, but for the old man’s sake.

The Big Sleep is an intriguing book. Plot-wise it’s confusing and not neatly tied up. The author himself, famously, wasn’t sure who killed the Sternwood chauffeur. And there’s one scene where Marlowe is captured by a notorious murderer, who then conveniently goes away, leaving him to be watched by a suggestible woman whom Marlowe persuades to free him. (A very weak plot device, you can’t deny.)

And yet this book is treasured by readers and critics alike. I treasure it myself. The prose is masterful, the characters are fascinating, the atmosphere draws you in, and the conclusion has been a model for all but the most cynical of hard-boiled writers ever since.

On this reading I was particularly struck by a minor character, the purest hero of this story. His name is Harry Jones. He’s a short, unprepossessing man, a two-bit gambler. Yet he makes the ultimate sacrifice for a woman who doesn’t deserve him. Marlowe pays him the greatest respect – he’s the man Marlowe would like to be, but pure knights of that sort do not survive in our world.

Taken all in all, The Big Sleep is a great novel. If you haven’t read it and like hard-boileds, you should. Cautions for drugs and sexual situations – pretty racy stuff for 1939.

Publishing, Reading

Books dropped and words picked up

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I had hoped to have a book review for you tonight, but I soured suddenly on the thing I was reading and gave it up. I’m not sure why I acquired it in the first place – the Amazon synopsis must have been misleading. It turned out to be a woman’s book, though the author was a man. It concerned a woman who gets involved with a couple who prove to have dark secrets. Seemed to be constructed on the basic Gothic pattern – a big old Victorian house was involved. But the story gave strong indications of wandering into Fifty Shades of Grey territory, and my interest dropped like one of my pills, or pens, or whatever other items I find myself dropping all the time in my dotage.

But I had a good morning. My audio book recording brought me – faster than I expected – to the end of Chapter 2 of Troll Valley. I found time to edit and master it too. The whole exercise was a lot less stressful than it has been up to now, so I felt no end of a professional narrator.

I think the final product will lack the polish that many audiobooks boast, but I believe I’m delivering a good performance. I was actually moved today, reading Otto Iverson’s testimony of faith – if you remember that scene in the old stone church. My voice caught a bit, but I did not stop the recording to do it over. The catch was in character.

I have learned very little wisdom in my long life, but I’ve gotten fairly comfortable with the difficult truths of incrementalism and perseverance – you do a little every day and it mounts up in the end. Don’t look at how little you’ve done today – watch how the work accumulates over time.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Long Goodbye,’ by Raymond Chandler

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She had an iron smile and eyes that could count the money in your hip wallet.

Recently I was poking around Amazon Prime for a movie to watch, and I hit on the old 1973 film adaptation of The Long Goodbye. I hadn’t seen it in many years, and watched it again just to see if I liked it any better than I did in my youth. I found I did not. It’s a Robert Altman vehicle, meaning Raymond Chandler’s story is mostly subsumed in Altman’s improvisations, and Elliott Gould is not Philip Marlowe by any stretch of the imagination. (I must confess the movie did the story no harm by simplifying the plot, though.)

Anyway, I figured I might as well re-read the book (first published 1953) and see how it compared. As I expected, I liked it a whole lot better than the movie, though it’s not without flaws.

Terry Lennox is sporadically one of Philip Marlowe’s few friends. He’s a wounded war veteran with interesting facial scars, and Marlowe encounters him sometimes in evening clothes with rich women on his arm, and sometimes drunk in the gutter. Terry has been married to an heiress named Sylvia, been divorced by her, and then remarried again. Now and then he and Marlowe get together for a drink.

One night Terry shows up asking Marlowe to drive him across the border to Mexico. Marlowe does this, with some misgivings. Once back, he learns the news – Terry’s wife has been murdered, and the police are looking for him. Marlowe gets arrested and subjected to some third degree… and then the whole business is dropped. Word is that Terry has killed himself in Mexico. Shortly afterward, Marlowe gets a letter from Terry, apparently posted just before his death. Tucked in the envelope is a $5,000 bill, which Marlowe puts away in his office safe because he’s uncomfortable about how he earned it.

Through his connection with Terry, Marlowe gets an inquiry from the publisher of Roger Wade, a bestselling author of historical thrillers. Roger has a serious drinking problem and writer’s block. The publisher has the idea that Marlowe might be the man to nursemaid Wade, dry him out and keep him working. Marlowe is not interested, even after a personal appeal from Wade’s stunningly beautiful wife, Eileen. But that doesn’t stop her appealing to him to find Wade after he disappears on a bender. Marlowe tracks him down at a seedy health spa and drags him home. He forms a prickly friendship with the man, while still refusing the babysitting job.

That’s enough to explain how things start out. The plot progresses in what seems to me a somewhat uneven, lurching fashion, as if Chandler was describing his own difficulties writing it through the creative travails of Roger Wade. The final conclusion is (to my mind) a little unsatisfying – but not as weird as the climax they gave us in the movie.

Critics, I understand, are divided concerning The Long Goodbye. Some consider it Chandler’s best work. Others judge it one of the weakest in the series. I myself enjoyed reading it, but found it a little claustrophobic. The story was, after all, somewhat crowded with author’s surrogates. Both Terry Lennox, the shell-shocked, psychologically broken war veteran, and Roger Wade, the bibulous, self-loathing author, are expressions of Chandler’s own self-image. And almost all narrator characters – including Philip Marlowe – are alter egos of their creators.

Also, the book features a series of “solutions,” each replacing the other as if the author couldn’t make up his mind.

But it’s worth reading. I enjoyed it all in all. Also, there’s references to the war in Norway.

The Kindle link I’m using here is for the edition I read, which is the only ebook edition I can find that’s not part of an omnibus. If you can find a different edition, I advise you to buy that, because this one (published in Ukraine) is laden with OCR errors. The “illustrations” advertised are just old paperback cover art, unrelated to the story.

I find, on searching our archives, that I’ve already reviewed this book here once. I need to review more Philip Marlowe novels, and have set about reading another.