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Fiction, Reviews

‘Death Among the Sunbathers,’ by E. R. Punshoh

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Death Among the Sunbathers

Not long ago I gave high praise to E.R. Punshon’s first Bobby Owen mystery, Information Received. Death Among the Sunbathers is the second book in the series, and to speak frankly I was a little disappointed in it. However, I have reason to believe the series will find its feet again in the third book.

Despite its sensationalist title, Death Among the Sunbathers isn’t a racy story featuring a lot of naked people running about. The fictional sun-worshiping organization featured here is a pretty mild one where most of the members wear something like bathing suits most of time.

In this story, a young female newspaper reporter is murdered in an engineered automobile accident, and Superintendent Mitchell, whom we know well from Information Received, is on the scene in the victim’s last moments. This motivates him to give special attention to this crime. Bobby Owen, now promoted to Detective, is in the story, but mostly off stage. He dogs the criminals unseen, until they come to fear him as an inexorable, almost superhuman Nemesis.

This approach, in my opinion, doesn’t work as well as the amusing mentor/mentee relationship established between him and Superintendent Mitchell in the first book. Without that magic, the narrative here seems theatrical and artificial.

Also I figured out the Big Surprise well before the author revealed it.

But I shall press on with the series, in hopes that balance will be restored in the next installment.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Long Ships,’ by Frans Gunnar Bengtsson

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The Long Ships

Meanwhile the fire had caught the straw on the floor, and eleven drunken or wounded men lying in it had been burned to death, so that this wedding was generally agreed to have been one of the best they had had for years in Finnveden, and one that would be long remembered.

Sometime last week it occurred to me that, although I’ve been praising the book to people most of my life, it’s actually been decades since I read Frans Gunnar Bengtsson’s The Long Ships. My old copy, printed in the 1960s, with a cover that doesn’t even appear on Amazon, is pretty much going to pieces, but it’s not terribly expensive to get a Kindle copy.

I’m happy to report that the book is as good as I remembered. Better. I still nominate it for the best Viking novel ever written – though a lot of Viking novels have been written in the last few years, and I haven’t read most of them. Nevertheless, it’s hard to imagine how anybody could do it better than this. (Pay no attention to the 1964 movie starring Richard Widmark. It’s a travesty.)

The Long Ships (Swedish title, Röde Orm), is the story of Red Orm Tostesson, younger son of a chieftain in Scania, which is part of Sweden today but was Danish back in the Viking Age. Early in the story he’s kidnapped by a Viking crew, who take him away into the Baltic and then south to Spain. There they, more or less by happenstance, “rescue” a Jewish slave from another Viking crew. He directs them to a rich city they can plunder, which eventually leads to their enslavement by the Moors, slavery in a galley, and then military service under the caliph of Cordoba. Further adventures bring them back to Denmark, into the favor of King Harald Bluetooth (the guy your wireless device was named after), and then home again. Followed by participation in Thorkel the Tall’s invasion of England, and an epic voyage into Russia in search of a hoard of gold. Continue reading ‘The Long Ships,’ by Frans Gunnar Bengtsson →

Fiction, Reviews

‘Information Received,’ by E. R. Punshon

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It’s a good day when I discover a mystery writer who a) I like, b) has a lot of books available, and c) comes cheap in Kindle format. And so I present to you, for the first time at Brandywine Books, the classic English detective novelist E. R. Punshon.

Punshon was admired by no less a figure than Dorothy Sayers, who saw his work as a positive development, helping to move the English mystery beyond the confines of the cozy “puzzle” story. Judging by Information Received, his first Bobby Owen mystery, she was correct. There’s a little more of real life here, and some fair psychology.

Constable Bobby Owen is a young London policeman, walking a beat. He actually attended Oxford, but his grades were lackluster, and so he sort of drifted into being a “bobby,” though he’s found the work pretty tedious thus far.

That all changes one day when he’s standing across the street from the home of a City magnate, Sir Christopher Clarke. Sir Christopher has been found shot to death, and Bobby gets just a glimpse of a man running away from the scene, though he can’t catch him.

Among the detectives who come in to look over the scene is Superintendent Mitchell, who takes a liking to the bright young policeman and allows him to help with the investigation. The motive seems unclear, the suspects seem to have little to gain, and means and opportunity are hard to sort out. But they work at it doggedly and in the end all his revealed.

The “fair psychology” I praised in this book does not apply to the murder itself, or the suspects, who are pretty melodramatic and not highly believable. But the relationship between Bobby and Supt. Mitchell is fascinating to follow. The older man guides Bobby, helps him sharpen his thinking, and exploits his talents, but all with a bemused and dryly playful air. He’s happy to give the young chap a career break, but he expects some entertainment along the way in the form of teasing him and testing his limits.

I enjoyed Information Received very much, and recommend it. I’d never heard of Punshon before I bought this book, but I’ve already bought the second work in the series.

Reviews

Netflix review: ‘The Heavy Water War’

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Photo credit: Robert Holand Dreier

In 1965 a film was made in Britain about the WWII Norwegian Resistance sabotage of the German heavy water project at Rjukan, Norway. It was called Heroes of Telemark, it starred Kirk Douglas, and it was essentially an upbeat and rather frivolous production. Norwegians complained that, in the movie, Kirk personally achieved in about two weeks what it took a whole unit of real saboteurs two years to do.

The 2015 Norwegian/Danish/English production, The Heavy Water War, available for streaming on Netflix, hews closer to the facts. It is artistically superior and far darker.

We follow the main character, Leif Tronstad (Espen Klouman Høiner; in this production, unlike the Douglas movie, the characters go under their real names, except for several fictionalized characters), a Norwegian scientist who escapes to England and joins the British-trained saboteur company there. Leif becomes their leader and gets emotionally involved with British intelligence officer Julie Smith (Anna Freil; a fictional character), but not so far as to actually commit adultery (they’re both married). We follow Leif and his company through the disastrous initial glider operation meant to destroy the Rjukan plant. Then follows the famous raid, where they succeed in blowing up the equipment, housed in the cellar of the factory. And after that, the hard decision to blow up the passenger ferry carrying the remaining heavy water out of the country, at the cost of civilian lives.

But there are actually three main threads in the narrative. We follow the manager of the heavy water plant (another fictionalized character) as he self-justifies his collaboration, and his troubled wife, who diverts her fears by mothering the daughter of her house maid. We also follow scientist Werner Heisenberg in Germany, singlemindedly focused on the scientific aspects of the atomic bomb project, refusing to think in moral categories. Each of these characters is treated as a full, complex human being. The viewer is left to make judgments.

My complaints are few. I wish the actors had looked more like the people they portray. The producers made the decision to suggest strongly that the explosion of the ferry was probably unnecessary (this, I believe, is a matter of dispute among historians).

The Heavy Water War is challenging, and sometimes tragic, but definitely worth watching. Recommended, for grownups.

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A Rosee outlook for Vikings in America

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Viking house at L'Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland, photo by Lars Walker
My photo of a reconstructed Viking house at L’Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland.

It’s been some time since I did my public duty by updating our erudite audience on the latest news from the world of Viking studies.

This story has been making the rounds lately, and to be honest it’s got my ears standing up. Archaeologists have used satellite imagery to identify a site in southwest Newfoundland that looks very much like a Viking Age Norse settlement.

“I am absolutely thrilled,” says Parcak. “Typically in archaeology, you only ever get to write a footnote in the history books, but what we seem to have at Point Rosee may be the beginning of an entirely new chapter.

“This new site could unravel more secrets about the Vikings, whether they were the first Europeans to ‘occupy’ briefly in North America, and reveal that the Vikings dared to explore much further into the New World than we ever thought.”

It’s too early to know for sure yet, of course. When the Ingstad group excavated the one known Viking site in North America, L’Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland, it took quite a lot of digging before they found something indisputably Norse – a ring-headed bronze pin, used for fastening a cloak. There’s a difference between finding a sod building, however much it might resemble the houses in Greenland, and finding something that couldn’t possibly have been left by Native Americans or English or Portuguese fishermen. That’s what they’ll be looking for now.

A lot of us have been waiting for something like this for some time. Prof. Helge Ingstad, having discovered his Vinland site in the 1960s, planted his metaphorical flag there and declared, “This is Vinland. This is all of Vinland there ever was. There’s no point for looking for any more traces of the Norse on this continent.” Everyone respects Ingstad immensely, and almost nobody agrees with that contention anymore. Ingstad thought that many of the saga descriptions, especially those speaking of grapes, were just folklore accretions to the story, because grapes have never grown at that latitude. Nowadays we take those descriptions more seriously – especially since butternuts were found in the excavations. Butternuts have also never grown at that latitude, but they do grow where grapes grow. This new site, further south along the Saint Lawrence Seaway, leads in the direction most scholars have been thinking of.

So this is exciting. We’ll be watching for more news.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Envoy Extraordinary,’ by E. Phillips Oppenheim

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Envoy Extraordinary

Sometimes a book attains added significance, not on its own merits, but because of its time and place.

That’s the case with E. Phillips Oppenheim’s Envoy Extraordinary. A pretty good thriller in its own right, its historical context adds a weird poignancy to the whole exercise.

The hero is Ronald Matresser, an English nobleman in the 1930s best known as a big game hunter. Few people are aware that he has been serving as a government agent in his travels, reporting on conditions in various hot spots. Now he has announced he’s settling down to take up his ancestral responsibilities in his home county and in Parliament.

But one night, during a powerful storm, a man is murdered bringing a message to Ronald’s palatial home. The same night a mysterious Dutch nobleman brings his yacht into the nearby port, despite the weather. The Dutchman, a large and intimidating man, pushes his way into Ronald’s social circle, and nearly murders Ronald and the Austrian woman he’s falling in love with, during a hunting party. Ronald soon realizes that the Dutchman is trying to disrupt his participation in an upcoming European peace conference.

Envoy Extraordinary is a book full of ironies. One assumes that people of good will, in those unsettled days, were hoping and working to find a way to avert the tragedies they could see coming (much as in our own time). Author Oppenheim (whose name, after all, was German) imagines a situation where the dictator of Germany (who appears in this book under a disguised name) was a genuine patriot, in failing health and willing to barter power of which he’s grown weary for the return of Germany’s colonies. An era of peace and stability is possible, if only the Dutchman can be stopped…

In light of actual events, it’s hard to read this book without a sad smile.

Still, it’s a good story, and worth reading on its own merits.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Abducted,’ by Roger Hayden

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I must be cranky these days. This is the second novel I’ve reviewed in two days which I thought well written, but to which I refuse to read the sequels.

The Abducted tells the story of a string of child kidnappings in a single county in southern Florida. Each kidnapping takes place precisely one year after the previous one. All the victims are blonde girls about ten years old. The only person to actually see the kidnapper – though not well – is Officer Miriam Castillo, who caught a glimpse during a routine traffic stop that ended disastrously. Miriam leaves the force in the wake of the disaster.

A year later she’s contacted by an old colleague, Detective Dwight O’Leary, who’s investigating the last kidnapping as a cold case. He thinks (for reasons that I frankly find hard to understand) that Miriam, who’s not a cop anymore, knows something that can crack the case. She agrees to help him, and an investigation and manhunt follow.

The book was well written, the characters and dialogue good. What annoyed me was that the author ended the book with a serious cliff-hanger. I guess I’m perverse about these things. I like to buy the next book because I enjoyed the last one, not because bait has been thrown over my fence.

So I think I’ll let this one go. You may enjoy it, though. It’s not at all bad.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter,’ by Malcolm Mackay

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It’s an interesting experience to read a book that’s extremely well done, but just doesn’t make you care.

That’s my experience with The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter, by Malcolm Mackay.

The book is written from the “narrator as omniscient camera” point of view. The author describes, dispassionately, utterly without judgment, as a young but “promising” hit man in Edinburgh takes the job of killing a small-time drug dealer. We follow him, we follow the gangsters who hire him, we follow the victim and the victim’s girlfriend, and the detective who investigates the murder, as well as others, all with the same clinical lack of judgment. The characters themselves make judgments all the time – each of them considers him or herself a pretty good person, under the circumstances, certainly better than those other fellows. But we are provided only the bare data – what happened. The author leaves it to us to draw morals, or not.

This is a very fine job of writing. The weakness is that there isn’t much reason to care about any of these people, and in the end I didn’t. This book is the first installment of a trilogy, but I can’t think of a reason to spend money to find out what happens next.

Still, author Mackay did an impressive job of doing what he did. If it interests you, by all means try it out.

Cautions for sex, violence, and language.

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‘The Legend of Ragnar Lodbrok’

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As you know, I’m not exactly a fan of the “History” Channel’s Vikings series. However, this book, which seems to have been produced in order to capitalize on the show’s popularity, was actually worth the money to me.

The Legend of Ragnar Lodbrok is a compendium of sagas, poems, and ancient annals, providing pretty much all we know of Ragnar’s legend out of the middle ages. The stories have very little credibility as historical sources – other than the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which is sparse on details, and Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum, which is a hopeless mess assembled with little historical or critical sense.

But it’s not often that I run into material on the Viking Age that I’ve never read before, and most of this was new to me. The saga story of Ragnar “Hairy Breeches” was written down long after the original events, and these sagas contradict one another in details and are generally unreliable. But they also contain many agreements, and the kernel of a true story seems to be here.

Only one section, the poem Krákumál, shows evidence of bad OCR reading, including a number of misprints. The rest of the book is well edited, and the scholarly notes are of high quality.

Worth reading, if you’re interested in this sort of thing.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Iron Chamber of Memory,’ by John C. Wright

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They spent a few moments looking for her dropped hat, gradually circling out from the path as they searched, but they did not find it. It seemed the wind had taken it away and hidden it somewhere among the trees. He found the size of them oddly disquieting, rather like seeing a cow taller than a man.

I have shot my mouth off more than once – publicly – about my low opinion of most contemporary Christian fantasy. When I do that (and I expect I’ll do it again) I need to make a clear exception for a very few writers. One of those is John C. Wright, author of the new ebook, Iron Chamber of Memory.

If I had to find a comparison for this work, the closest thing I can think of is George MacDonald’s Lilith. It takes place (mostly) in a world which is ours, but not quite the same as ours. And there are excursions to worlds even stranger.

Hal Landfall, the hero, is an American student at Oxford University. His best friend is Manfred Hathaway, who has just inherited the Channel island of Sark, “the last feudal government in Europe.” On Sark no automobiles are permitted, and no electric lights burn at night. Manfred is engaged to the beautiful Laurel. Hal is attracted to her too, but would never dream of making a move on his friend’s fiancée.

But that’s in our world. There is a secret room in Manfred’s manor house in which all the relationships are different, and all the identities somehow altered. But Hal only remembers this when he enters that room – so he has to leave himself messages, to “trick” himself into going there.

And that room is only the first of a series of secret rooms…

Iron Chamber of Memory is simply a wonderful fantasy story – an original and unforgettable work of imagination. It’s about memory, and it’s about sex – or rather, erotic love. Not a dirty book, but I wouldn’t give it to younger readers. C.S. Lewis described That Hideous Strength as a “fairy tale for adults,” and that’s what this is.

Splendid stuff. Much recommended. There are a few copyreading errors (or I think they are), especially where Manfred repeatedly gets called Mandrake for no apparent reason. I assume that’s an incomplete search an replace job in the word processing, though there may be a subtle message being sent that I’m just too dense to comprehend.

Anyway, read this book. Especially if you’re a MacDonald fan. Strong Protestants may take issue with some Roman Catholic sentiments expressed.

Also, what a great cover!