Category Archives: Reviews

‘All Hands On Deck,’ by Will Sofrin

…being aloft in that storm made me appreciate all I was learning. We were on only day four of our passage, had traveled only one-tenth of the distance to our destination, and I had already seen more than I could have imagined or planned for. There was no off switch, no time-out, no opportunity to stop and take a break. That moment forever changed my understanding of how to handle adversity. The only way out was through.

Like many other people of taste, I have a great fondness for the 2003 move, Master and Commander, starring Russell Crowe. I find sailing fascinating (though I have almost no experience with it), and have enjoyed reading both the Horatio Hornblower and the Aubrey/Matchurin classic novel series. The movie was a box-office disappointment, but has acquired a well-deserved popularity in the ensuing years.

But one thing it never occurred to me to wonder about was where they got the ship that served as the HMS Surprise in the movie. Turns out it was originally called the Rose (after the historical HMS Rose of the British Navy), and had had a lackluster career as a museum ship and tourist attraction on the US East Coast. When the movie studio decided to buy it, it was docked at Newport, Rhode Island. That was where Will Sofrin, a somewhat rudderless young boat bum, joined the crew. He and a motley, coed group of sailors took the ship (which turned out to be poorly built, badly maintained, and leaky) through the Panama Canal to San Diego, surviving a hurricane, a dismasting, and various interpersonal conflicts along the way. The final result is the book, All Hands On Deck: A Modern-Day High Seas Adventure to the Far Side of the World.

I always enjoy a good sea story, and Sofrin does an excellent job telling the tale of this voyage. He works in a lot of background about how the British Navy operated in the Age of Sail, as well as more detail than most of us will probably ever need about sailing techniques and technical terms. This information will be of great benefit to fans of Patrick O’Brian’s novels.

The human drama that went on among the crew, particularly when it comes to sexual relations between members of a mixed-sex crew, sometimes offered more information than I wanted. But the story as a whole was human and relatable, and the lessons the author learned were exemplary. He also writes pretty well.

I enjoyed reading All Hands On Deck, and recommend it, especially for O’Brian fans.

Amazon Prime film review: ‘Marlowe’

I caught the 2022 film, “Marlowe” on Amazon Prime. Anything related to Philip Marlowe always intrigues me, so I watched it in spite of the poor reviews it’s gotten. I liked it in many ways, but somehow it fell apart at the end.

There seem to be two varieties of Philip Marlowe in the cinematic world. Usually he’s portrayed as a strong, tall man, young or no older than middle age. But 1975 brought us “Farewell, My Lovely,” featuring an aging Robert Mitchum, who was so perfect for the role that he made it work (there was even a sequel, “The Big Sleep,” where the whole scenario got bizarrely transplanted to London. But once again, Mitchum pulled it off).

“Old Marlowe” is back, after a fashion, in Marlowe, based not on a Chandler novel, but on a 2014 pastiche called The Black-Eyed Blonde, which I understand to have been based on an outline (or a note or something) from Chandler himself. Liam Neeson dons the trench coat and fedora, playing the role with a world-weary slump. Traces of his Irish accent edge through, and we’re told that he fought in an Irish regiment during World War I. (Which is, I think, new information.) The film is set in 1930, and the costumes and sets are pretty good.

Marlowe, as one expects, gets a visit in his office from a beautiful, wealthy blonde, Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger). She is married, but her concern is with her lover, Nico Peterson (Francois Arnault), who has disappeared. Marlowe learns with little trouble that Nico is officially dead, run over by a car outside the swanky Corbata Club. But Clare insists that she recently saw Nico alive in Tijuana. Complications arise in the form of Clare’s mother, the aging actress Dorothy Quincannon (Jessica Lange. Her character is blatantly based on Gloria Swanson). Drug smuggling and Hollywood studio politics also show up, and civic corruption is revealed.

Liam Neeson is always fun to watch, even when he looks tired. The script was erudite – too erudite, it seemed to me. Raymond Chandler could rock a classical allusion with the best of them, but he knew better than to put quotations in everybody’s mouths.

But my main problem with the film was that the plot kind of went to pieces at the end. A new Maguffin appears out of the blue, and then we get swept up in a lot of references to Nazism that haven’t been set up in the story.

Nevertheless, I can’t deny I enjoyed watching “Marlowe,” most of the way through. Cautions for language, adult themes, and (of course) violence.

Reading report: ‘Kristin Lavransdatter,’ by Sigrid Undset

“It seems to me that the dragon is awfully small,” said Kristin, looking at the image of the saint who was her namesake. “It doesn’t look as if it could swallow up the maiden.”

“And it couldn’t, either,” said Brother Edvin. “It was no bigger than that. Dragons and all other creatures that serve the Devil only seem big as long as we harbor fear within ourselves. But if a person seeks God with such earnestness and desire that he enters into His power, then the power of the Devil at once suffers such a great defeat that his instruments become small and unimportant. Dragons and evil spirits shrink until they are no bigger than goblins and cats and crows. As you can see, the whole mountain that Saint Sunniva was trapped inside is so small that it will fit on the skirt of her cloak.”

Saint Sunniva won’t be familiar to non-Norwegian readers, and not even to most Norwegians if they’re the American kind. She is a legendary saint supposed to have been martyred by Jarl Haakon (whom you’ll remember from The Year of the Warrior and Death’s Doors). She fled into a cave with her companions to avoid falling into Haakon’s hands, and they all died there. Later King Olaf Trygvesson found their uncorrupted bodies and declared their sainthood. I never used the legend in my own books.

I shared with you a special deal on Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy in the Tina Nunnally translation last month, and now I’ve taken up (re-)reading it myself. I’ve read the trilogy before – twice in the previous English translation and once in the original Norwegian. I should probably read that again, but my second-hand copy’s in very poor condition. And I wanted to try Nunnally – I’ve heard good things about her work.

I admit I approached the book with some degree of reluctance. It’s a fine example of the great Scandinavian tradition of depressing literature (though with the ameliorating influence of Christian faith, which most of the other modern stuff lacks). Kristin is a vivid and fascinating character, mostly respectable by most people’s standards, and always honorable in her own eyes. Yet Undset’s penetrating artistic eye looks deeply into her essential selfishness, which is gradually revealed to Kristin herself through a lifetime of living with consequences.

I’ve often said that Kristin Lavransdatter is an inverted romance novel. The beautiful, willful young girl defies her parents to run off with the dashing knight. But where the romance heroine lives happily ever after, Kristin has to live with her choices. All her chickens come home to roost, one after the other. And yet, the promise of God’s grace never leaves her.

What do I think of Tina Nunnally’s translation? It’s good. I can never read a Norwegian translation (my own included) anymore without quibbling, of course. I sometimes think this one a little too literal, just a little clunky. But I probably need to remove the beam from my own eye before I say that.

The first English translation, done in the 1920s by Charles Archer and J. S. Scott, has been criticized as artificially mannered, featuring deliberate English archaisms that don’t correspond to Undset’s idiomatic Norwegian. I understand the concern, though I can’t help sympathizing a little with Archer and Scott. One of the pleasures, for me, of working with Norwegian is the fact that its diction does have a kind of medieval quality from an English-speaker’s point of view. If I ask, “What means this word?” in English, that’s Renaissance Faire talk, but it’s perfectly grammatical in Norwegian. Getting used to such sentence construction has heavily influenced the way I write my Viking novels. When I think out a sentence in Norwegian, I sound medieval.

But the old translation had other sins, too, I am informed. Certain passages were bowdlerized, and are now restored in this version. (No doubt another, politically correct, bowdlerization is on its way soon, courtesy of Our Betters. So read this one while we enjoy a season of free speech.)

It’s pointless to criticize Kristin Lavransdatter as a work of art. It’s above my pay grade, and I’ve written much about it before. But I recommend it without reservation.

‘Manistique,’ by Craig Terlson

I shook my head. Lydia studied my face, looking for the lie.

“We’re just looking for answers,” I said.

That part was true—otherwise, I would’ve left this soggy grayscape days ago. Even now, the sun pulled a Houdini and went back to its usual place, shining somewhere over a cornfield in Kansas.

Luke Fischer, hero of Manistique, a Canadian transplant in Mexico, is emphatically not a private eye. But he ends up looking for people anyway. When his friend Franco, who is a private eye, asks him to sit in on a private poker game, he ends up witnessing a shooting. A young woman dies, and there’s talk of missing money. Soon Luke is headed to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (of all places) trying to find the young woman’s father, who is rumored to have stolen a lot of money from some dangerous people.

In Michigan, Luke finds himself teaming up with “Sam,” an attractive female county sheriff. The body count rises steadily as they pursue Luke’s quarry, and when that man is killed, they pursue the killers. The trail will finally lead them all the way to New Mexico.

I very much enjoyed, and positively reviewed, Three-Minute Hero, the book that follows Manistique in the Luke Fischer series (I seem to be reading them in the wrong order). And the virtues of that book were displayed here – colorful hard-boiled prose and strong dialogue.

But the weaknesses were here too – a little more apparently. Chief of these is a certain aimlessness in the plotting. Although there’s plenty of violence in this story – and it’s pretty explosive – one can’t help wondering in the intervals what these people are here for. Luke’s mission is somewhat vague from the start, and even when he’s finished the job he was paid to do, he feels obligated to keep following the money –  though he doesn’t seem interested in it for its own sake. It’s something about justice, for people he barely knows.  One senses an echo of Carlos Castaneda, too,  as he has a mystical conversation on a motel porch with an old man who may or may not exist. Perhaps this is all an existentialist exercise.

I must also confess my slight annoyance at a surrender to current intellectual fashion, evidenced by the inclusion of not one, but two Girl Boss characters – women indistinguishable from men except in their physical appearance, one of whom easily tosses much larger men around a room.

And I have a couple Gun Culture quibbles – a .40 caliber pistol is described as remarkably powerful, and a “silencer” reduces pistol shots to a near-whisper (that’s technology firearms companies would pay good money for, because it doesn’t exist yet).

Author Craig Terlson is now a friend of mine on X, and an entertaining one. I like his writing very much, and all in all I enjoyed Manistique – especially as the story approached its big, climactic showdown. The next book in the series will show considerable improvement, so he’s learning the craft. I recommend this book, in spite of some weaknesses.

‘Fade Up From Black,’ by Steven Womack

I get a lot of free e-books through online offers, as I’ve mentioned before. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising, in these days of self-publishing, that a fair number of those books are unreadable. For one reason or another. Unless an author writes so egregiously that I can’t restrain my pen, I’ve taken to generally dropping these books and forgetting them. Nobody set me up as a judge of aspiring novelists.

I had dumped two books in a row in the aforementioned manner, before I picked up Steven Womack’s Fade Up From Black: The Return of Harry James Denton. I was delighted to encounter readable prose, and settled back to enjoy it.

Harry James Denton is, apparently, the hero of a private eye series which the author dropped for a while, and is now picking up again. Harry lives in Nashville, Tennessee. He and his partner built their investigative business up into a digital security company, and now they’re both multimillionaires. But Harry’s old girlfriend, with whom he had a passionate but volatile relationship, recently died of cancer, leaving behind their 15-year-old daughter. The girl has been living with her mother in Reno, but will now be moving to Nashville to live with Harry.

However, the day before he leaves for the funeral, Harry gets a visitor in his office. The man is Leo Walsh, who was briefly a celebrated novelist some years back. A series of bad decisions led him downhill, and now he’s teaching screenplay writing at a seedy local cinema school. Leo tells Harry he wants him to investigate a murder – his own murder.

Harry explains that he doesn’t really do private investigation anymore, though he keeps his license current. He has a lot on his plate and can’t take the case. Leo Walsh walks away disappointed. When Harry returns with his daughter a few days later, he’s shocked to learn that Leo’s body has been found beaten to death and left behind a dumpster.

Harry feels guilty about turning the man away. Learning that the police have made no headway, and aren’t even trying very hard, he decides to stretch his investigative muscles again.

As I mentioned, the prose in Fade Up From Black was pretty good. That’s always a plus. But it takes more than good prose to make a successful mystery story. I’d been reading a while when I realized that the narrative was moving at a snail’s pace. Many pages passed between actual plot developments. The author has a fascination with describing Nashville traffic, for instance.

When things finally do start happening, Harry seems to have lost more than a step as a PI. He gets an anonymous threat over his cell phone – a threat not only against him but against his friends and daughter. Yet he – although he is a multimillionaire and owns A FREAKING SECURITY COMPANY, just ignores it, not taking a minute to employ the resources with which he’s so richly supplied. And again, in the buildup to the final confrontation, he puts off calling on his highly capable friends.

There are a couple veiled political comments in the book, and I think it’s fair to conclude that the author is a lefty. However, he actually did a pretty good job of trying to be evenhanded.

But overall, Fade Up From Black was a disappointment, flaccid in plot and deficient in dramatic tension.

‘Central City,’ by Indy Perro

“Pete wants to know if there’s something there. He wants you to have the case because he believes you are honest and meticulous but still our guy, and we’re all on the same side…. I, on the other hand, didn’t want you on the case because I know you. I know you won’t let go of something if you don’t understand it.”

“Would you?”

“Yes. I’ve learned the hard way that sometimes you need to let things go. You can’t make the world right.”

Kane liked Detective Vincent Bayonne. Bayonne looked like a mountain man and a long-haul trucker had a coyote for a baby, but he had intuition.

A few days back I reviewed Indy Perro’s Welcome to the Party, a prequel to his noir mystery series featuring Detective Vince Bayonne and his gangster informant, Kane Kulpa. I noted that the writing and characterization were excellent. But that novella did not really prepare me for Central City, the first book in the series.

The year is 1992. The fictional Central City is run in the time-honored way – organized crime and the cops work in an uneasy partnership. Neither side wants blood in the streets. It’s bad for business. Even honest cops like Vince Bayonne “have a taste” from time to time; it’s the only way his criminal contacts will trust him. He has a new partner, a fat young man with brains but a lot to learn.

Kane Kulpa is right-hand man to two partners who run gambling and drugs and prostitution in a section of the city. He seems void of ambition. People think he’s lost the nerve that made him notorious during his time in prison. Few know about the mute, brain-damaged woman he shelters in his apartment.

When a naked man is found dead in a massage parlor, strangled with a belt and posed as if in prayer, Kane’s bosses want Bayonne on the case, for reasons explained in the snippet at the top of this review. But Bayonne is stymied. Usually, when he looks at a murder scene, it speaks to him, tells him a story. But this scene tells him nothing. When other men are found murdered the same way, he flounders. Meanwhile, a gang war starts, and Kane will have to decide where his loyalty lies.

I was very impressed with Central City. This is about as noir as a novel gets. The violence was shocking, the final resolution (mostly) a surprise. And Indy Perro is simply a knockout wordslinger. His descriptions fascinate, and his characters are compelling.

Still, I wasn’t entirely happy. The final resolution seemed a little too grand opera, too over the top. The story offers one of those familiar crime scenarios where really bad people – pimps and drug dealers – are rendered sympathetic simply by the fact that they’re contrasted with opponents who are monsters. And the picture of how a city works was simply depressing (worse because you can’t be sure it’s exaggerated).

Also, the author used “begging the question” wrong once. With his gifts, he should know better.

A notable eccentricity in the story is the information, casually related, that one of the city’s criminal bosses is a Lutheran pastor.

I hope Central City is excessive in its picture of the world. On the other hand, certain characters do exhibit genuine nobility from time to time.

I’m not sure what my final judgment on Central City is. Except that it was extremely well written and atmospheric. It left an impression. Definitely worth reading, if you like to take your Noir straight.

‘A Presumption of Death,’ by Jill Paton Walsh

…Like the gentleman in the carol, I have seen a wonder sight—the Catholic padre and the refugee Lutheran minister having a drink together and discussing, in very bad Latin, the persecution of the Orthodox Church in Russia. I have seldom heard so much religious toleration or so many false quantities…

A while ago I reviewed Thrones, Dominations, the first Lord Peter Wimsey novel written by the late Jill Paton Walsh, based on notes by Dorothy Sayers, the creator of the character. I generally liked it, though I thought it sometimes a little forced.

But I thought I’d try the next book in the series, A Presumption of Death, a book Ms. Walsh wrote all by herself, based on a suggestion from Sayers’ writings. She took on a great challenge, but in my opinion the results were almost pitch perfect.

It’s 1939, and England is at war. British forces are on the back foot in Norway (there are many references to Norway in this story). Lord Peter Wimsey, long an asset of British Intelligence, is doing some kind of hush-hush, dangerous work in a place he’s not at liberty to reveal. His nephew Gerald is having the time of his life as an RAF pilot. Harriet Vane, Lord Peter’s wife, has moved the family – including her two babies – from London to Tallboys, to the country house they acquired in Busman’s Honeymoon. In the town, airmen from a nearby base are having a lot of fun with the “land girls,” city girls enlisted to do farm work in the absence of male workers.

Then, after the town’s first air raid drill, one of the girls is found murdered – clearly killed by someone familiar with unarmed combat. The local police detective asks Harriet to help him with the investigation – he feels out of his depth, and she has experience in these things, both as a detective novelist and as a collaborator with her husband. But she makes little progress. Then another body is found – that of a convalescing airman who’d rented a local cottage, apparently slaughtered in a makeshift abattoir in the Wimsey’s barn. When that airman’s identification proves questionable, mystery piles on mystery. That’s when Lord Peter himself appears at last. His exalted connections allow him, with Harriet’s help, to get to the truth of the situation.

I can honestly say that I completely forgot that I was reading a pastiche as I read A Presumption of Death. The book seemed to me a completely successful recreation of the characters, the settings, and the period. If Dorothy Sayers had continued writing Lord Peter books, I’m pretty sure she’d have produced something very much like this. The resolution of the book, in particular, seemed to me very much in Sayers’ spirit – a reconciliation of justice and mercy, with an ambivalent suggestion that mercy might not be as merciful as we imagine.

One annoying peculiarity in the book was the author’s repeated misspelling of the word “bailing” in “bailing out” (of an airplane). She spells it “baling.” The editors should have caught this (assuming it’s not just spelled differently in England).

I was also surprised to learn that (according to Lord Peter’s sister) the Delagardie side of Lord Peter’s family is not French, but Swedish.

Anyway, I relished A Presumption of Death. Well done.

‘The Ghost Orchid,’ by Jonathan Kellerman

He had the kind of bony body that seems to diminish when it settles, as if inadequately supported by musculature. Crossing his legs had the effect of compressing him further.

If I remember correctly, when Jonathan Kellerman started writing his Alex Delaware/Milo Sturgis novels, they proceeded more or less in real time. The characters aged like you and I. But the series has been going on for decades now, and in a real world both of them would be long retired, if not dead (especially with Milo’s dietary habits). I think Kellerman has made the decision to freeze them, and they won’t be ageing anymore. Indeed, Milo’s hair, which sported gray stripes for a long time, is now described as fully black again.

And that’s good news. It means the books can go on as long as Kellerman can keep cranking them out. So long may he live, and keep writing.

The last book ended with a bang, and psychologist Alex is still recovering physically as The Ghost Orchid begins. Cop Milo feels guilty about putting him in harm’s way, and so has not called for his assistance in a while. Alex, on the other hand, is finding the inactivity tedious. Finally, Milo calls. He has a couple murder victims not far from Alex’s house, in case he’d care to have a look. Alex quickly responds.

Af first it doesn’t appear to be any particularly mystery. An attractive couple, she rather older than he, both naked and shot to death next to his pool. Her wealthy husband is the obvious suspect.

But the husband was out of the country at the time of the murder, and more than that he genuinely seems to have been ignorant of her infidelity. And she turns out to be an enigma – a false identity which, traced back, leads to another false identity. Who was she? Where did she come from? Or was this about her lover? Did he have some dark secret?

The Ghost Orchid is mostly a psychological narrative, telling a story of horrific abuse and its ramifications. The puzzle is more important than the suspense or action this time out, and that suits me just fine.

The Ghost Orchid offered the usual, familiar pleasures of a Jonathan Kellerman mystery. I enjoyed it. There are a couple Christian characters, and they come off as sympathetic. Recommended.

‘Welcome to the Party,’ by Indy Perro

“You think I’m in the wrong line of work?”

“I think running a bar can be more fun than most jobs, including mine. It can also be a lot of work.”

“People deserve a cold one after a long day.”

“People enjoy a cold one. I’m not sure what any of us deserve.”

I knew nothing of Indy Perro, author of the novella Welcome to the Party, before I picked it up on a free offer. But I was happy with what I got.

It’s 1973 (this is, I think, a prequel story). Vincent Bayonne is a rookie cop in (the fictional) Central City. He’s recently back from Vietnam. He misses the action, and became a cop for the danger, and maybe to make a difference. But so far, the work has been pretty routine. He and his veteran partner are assigned to what’s considered a plum day’s assignment – providing security for a mayoral candidate who’ll be making a speech at a VFW post.

The candidate, it turns out, is both a lush and a lech. The crowd will turn out a little more rambunctious than expected. And Vincent will get the opportunity to save a life.

Welcome to the Party is a simple story. The writing is spare and clean, the characters believable and sympathetic. I was impressed. I’ve purchased the next book in the series, and look forward to seeing where this is going.

‘Do-Overs,’ by Jon Spoelstra

Time travel books form an interesting sub-genre of science fiction. Some writers like to play with the inherent paradoxes of the time-line – what happens if the hero kills his own grandfather? What happens if he meets himself? Suppose you killed Hitler as a baby – would fate provide a second-string substitute and history go on pretty much the same?

Other time travel stories are more about memory and regret. That’s the case with Jon Spoelstra’s Do-Overs, a book tailor-made to appeal to people of a certain age, who have life regrets. As a man who meets both criteria, I liked it.

Roy Hobbs (same name as the hero of The Natural) used to be a Chicago news reporter. Then his ex-wife, whom he still cared for, fell victim to a vicious serial killer. Roy wrote a bestselling book about the murders. But he lost all the money he earned.

Now he’s gotten an invitation from a reclusive billionaire, one of the old Silicon Valley computer moguls. He and a group of his fellow billionaires have pooled their resources on something like a privately funded Manhattan Project. Their purpose was to prove the existence of parallel universes. This, he says, they have accomplished. There are multitudes of parallel universes, mostly differing from one another only in minor details. By traveling between these universes, it’s possible to move about in time – though never in our own universe; only in the others.

What he wants from Roy, he says, is a book. A book only he himself will read. He wants the book to describe Roy’s own subjective experiences in parallel universes, not the science. The payment will be princely. Roy sees no reason to refuse.

Naturally, he travels to his own past. There, he observes himself meeting his wife for the first time. He is astonished at the sensation of seeing her, and falling in love again. But on another trip, as he’s following her around, she notices him and makes an excuse to meet him. She feels, she tells him, a strange attraction to him (in spite of their near-thirty-year age difference). Apparently, Roy comes to believe, there’s such a thing as a “cosmic connection,” which binds souls (or something) together, even across universes.

Enthused by this renewed passion, Roy makes up his mind to travel to many universes and stop the killer early in his career, saving his wife and as many women as possible. What he doesn’t realize is that this cosmic connection connects more than love – he may have given the murderer the key to a longer, even bloodier career in countless iterations.

Do-Overs was adequately written. The prose wasn’t memorable, and there were occasional grammatical slips, as in when we’re told a character “had drank” wine. The narrator also speaks of an “uncompromising position” when he means a “compromising position.”

But the storytelling was adequate, it kept my interest, and I cared about the characters. We’ve all imagined going back and fixing our lives’ mistakes. It was pleasant to follow a character doing just that.

There was a little more sex than I thought necessary in this book, and it was just a tad more explicit than it had to be. Is it immoral to go to bed with a woman you just met, when she’s been your wife already in another universe? Intriguing question.

However that is, I found Do-Overs quite a lot of fun. Recommended.