All posts by Lars Walker

Uncategorized

Hip, hip, hooray

2 Comments

I woke up lying on my left side this morning, which made it a good day.

Let me explain. I had my left hip replaced, as I’ve mentioned, about a month ago. One of the things they tell you when you get your upgrade is that it’s good to lie in bed with the wound side down. Helps the healing somehow. This, of course, is easier said than done. Even while you’re on the prescription pain killers (which I quit weeks ago), you’re not so numb that lying on top of your stitches is something you’d ever choose to do for fun.

But this morning I found that I’d rolled over on that side in my sleep. Which means I’m healing up. I knew that already, of course. On Saturday it occurred to me that I was in less pain than I’d been the day before the operation. So it’s all upswing from here on.

And I’m almost done with my graduate school work. My capstone project paper is essentially written; just a little buffing and padding to do. Monday’s the deadline, and I’m likely to turn it in before then.

All this makes right now a pretty good time in my life.

It’s been a strange 2¼ years. I began school way back in late 2013, and then came the first hip replacement in January, and now I’m recovering from the matching procedure just before finishing the academic work for good. A long stretch of time, bracketed by prosthetics.

This is not what I expected my life to be like when I got to middle age. But it has been interesting.

They say prisoners feel a reluctance to leave the penitentiary after an extended stay. It doesn’t matter how grim and abusive the prison is – it has become familiar and comfortable, in some way. Outside the walls anything can happen – do I remember the rules? Have the rules changed?

I feel something vaguely similar about facing life after grad school. Not that I have to wonder what I’ll do with my time. I’ve got novels to write and a regular blogging schedule to pick up again. I’ll be able to have dinner with friends in the evenings, without rearranging my study schedule. But it’s a change, and in my heart I don’t much like change.

So will I go for my doctorate now?

Not if I have anything to say about it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Lewis Man,’ by Peter May

1 Comment

Beyond the curve of the hill, Fin could see the dark roof of Crobost Church dominating both the skyline and the people over whose lives its shadow fell. Someone had hung out washing at the manse, and white sheets flapped furiously in the wind like demented semaphore flags urging praise and fear of God in equal measures.

Fin loathed the church and all it stood for. But there was comfort in its familiarity. This, after all, was home. And he felt his spirits lifted.

I gave the first volume of Peter May’s Lewis trilogy, The Blackhouse, a mixed review the other day (see below). I thought the writing superior, but the main character inadequate. Fin Macleod, the hero, seemed to me a little passive and emo (too much like me, frankly) to be a mystery detective. But the setting in the Outer Hebrides was fascinating and seductive, and I bought the second book, The Lewis Man. I’m glad I did. I consider this one considerably better, and the first wasn’t all that bad.

Fin Macleod is back in his childhood home at the northern tip of the island of Lewis. His career as an Edinburgh detective is over, as is his marriage. He’s at loose ends, still mourning the death of his young son, but now he has living connections on Lewis, including Marsaili, the woman he was in love with as a boy.

Though he lacks an official police position, Fin is asked by his friend George Gunn, local cop, to come and assist when a body is found buried in a peat bog. At first they think it’s one of those famous prehistoric bog burials, sacrificial victims perfectly preserved in the acidic peat, that show up in northern Europe from time to time. But this victim has an Elvis Presley tattoo on one arm, which makes the death a modern murder.

The investigation uncovers a tangle of old secrets involving the treatment of orphans and organized crime. And it soon becomes clear that Marsaili’s father, now sinking into dementia, is not the person he claims to be. DNA evidence shows him to be a close relative of the murder victim. Is the gentle old man a killer?

I liked Fin Macleod much better this time around – he acted more like a detective, even off the payroll. And the writing was once again exceptional – especially the descriptions of Hebrides scenery and weather. The ending was perhaps a tad contrived, but it was also satisfying and emotionally touching.

Recommended. Cautions, mostly, for language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Blackhouse,’ by Peter May

3 Comments

The northern part of Lewis was flat and unbroken by hills or mountains, and the weather swept across it from the Atlantic to the Minch, always in a hurry. And so it was always changing. Light and dark in ever-shifting patterns, one set against the other – rain, sunshine, black sky, blue-sky. And rainbows. My childhood seemed filled by them. Usually doublers.

I was encouraged to check out Peter May’s “Lewis Trilogy” of Scottish police novels. I have now read The Blackhouse, the first of them. My reaction is positive, but mixed. The writing (witness the passage above) is superior. My main problem with the book was with the main character and sometime narrator (he narrates the out-of-sequence flashbacks which constitute about half of the book), Fin McLeod, Edinburgh police detective. One likes to like the hero of a book, but sometimes Fin is hard to like. However, there’s a reason for that, entirely in line with the purposes of the story.

Fin is a native of the island of Lewis, in the Hebrides, a bleak place where life is tough to sustain and economic times are hard. He got away and became a policeman in Edinburgh, and has been back only once since. But when a man is murdered in his old home town, in a way almost identical to a murder he’s investigating in Edinburgh, he’s assigned to go and see if there’s a connection.

Back at home, he encounters many old friends and enemies, most of them greatly changed physically but much the same at heart. The course of his investigation rouses memories, which constitute the many long flashbacks in the narrative. Gradually he finds that the similarities between the two murders are no accident, and that he will have to confront the deepest and blackest secrets of his past.

As I mentioned, I found it hard to root for Fin sometimes. He often seems cold and unsympathetic to others. But it’s not surprising that he keeps people at a distance, considering the amount of loss he suffered growing up, as we learn. He seems to have been touched by more than his share of tragedy, even in a place where life is a marginal proposition for most.

For the Christian reader, there are interesting implications. Fin describes himself as not a believer, but not an atheist either – he’s just mad at God. Christians – and there are many on Lewis – seem to be uniformly pinched and joyless. On the other hand, one of the most important positive characters in the book reads the Bible constantly and draws wisdom from it. So I think there’s more going on here than mere flippant modern secularism.

The Blackhouse is a beautiful book, but challenging. I’m not sure whether I recommend it or not, but I’ve bought the sequel. Cautions for sex and language and graphic descriptions of murdered bodies.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Island of Sheep,’ by John Buchan

Leave a comment

I’ve told you often of my fondness for John Buchan’s books, especially the Richard Hannay series, through which I’m working my way. Most recently I read The Island of Sheep, which offered the usual pleasures, with the addition of a Scandinavian element for me.

Richard Hannay, retired British intelligence agent, is settling into a peaceful country life with his wife and son, and feeling a little uncomfortable about it. So he’s up for an adventure when an event from his past reaches forward into his present.

Long ago, in Africa, he and a friend helped to save the life of a well-known explorer, a Dane named Haraldsen. When it was all done, Haraldsen called on both of them to make a vow, in Viking fashion (he’s a Scandinavian romantic), to come to his help, or his son’s, at any time. Now Richard hears from the son. Old enemies of his father’s from Africa have reappeared, with both a lawsuit and an implied physical threat. Young Haraldsen has a daughter, and he’s terrified for her safety as well as his own.

Hannay and the friend who also made the vow sally forth from their respectable lives then, to keep their promise, with the help of another old friend, familiar to the reader from previous books, and Hannay’s teenaged son.

The story climaxes in a struggle on the Island of Sheep, Haraldsen’s home (one assumes it’s really in the Faeroe Islands, since that’s what “Faeroe” means). It’s all fairly preposterous, but Buchan knows how to tell a story, and it’s great fun. As usual.

Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Breakdown,’ by Jonathan Kellerman

Leave a comment

The big problem with a successful, ongoing fiction series is self-repetition. The template for Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware novels is pretty well established. Dr. Delaware, successful child psychologist, gets a call from his police detective buddy Milo Sturgis (overweight, conservative, and “gay”), who asks him to advise him on some case in progress. Alex happily cooperates, and together they uncover motive, means, and opportunity. (In real life, of course, Alex would never be allowed to meddle in police work that way, and defense lawyers would have a heyday with his involvement. But in the real world both Alex and Milo would be long retired by now, so why mess with success?).

In Breakdown, the latest in the series, author Kellerman jiggers the template a little. This time it’s Alex who asks for Milo’s help in a case of his own. Some years ago, he was called in to consult on the welfare of a child at risk. The little boy’s mother was an actress on a TV sitcom. She had personality disorders, but seemed to be functioning all right as a mother, and Alex found her son highly intelligent but otherwise normal.

Now he gets a call from a mental health worker. The actress, long out of work, has been found living on the streets, psychotic. Her primary psychologist is dead, so Alex is now the health care professional of record on the file. Alex talks to the former actress, being held in a ridiculous government-funded facility (which gives the author a chance to make some pointed comments on our current mental health system). She’s almost completely psychotic now. There seems to be no record that she ever had a child, and Alex, driven by concern and guilt, enlists Milo in trying to uncover the actress’s past, to see what happened to the boy.

What they uncover is a dark family secret and a string of unsolved murders going back decades.

I always enjoy the Alex Delaware books, and this one pleased me particularly. I love cold case stories, and Breakdown was a fascinating one.

Creative Writing, Religion, Uncategorized, Writing

‘Mary Sue the Barbarian’

3 Comments

Patheos Public Square has published an article by me. You can read it here.

It is Christians, after all, who (almost alone in our present age) recognize that “there is none that doeth good, no, not one.” Our confessions declare that we are not good people but evil people, saved not by our golden deeds and noble aspirations, but by the work of Someone Else. To look into our own hearts, recognize the evil there, and mine that material for dramatic ore ought to be no problem for us. We’ve seen our sin (presumably) and repented it. We are under no further illusions about our essential goodness. When a story calls for a monster, we ought to have plenty of models at hand. We ought to have Legions.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Black Gang,’ by H. C. McNeile

1 Comment

I invested in a complete set of Bulldog Drummond books for Kindle. So I’ll review the second book, though there’s little to say about its virtues or failings beyond what I said in my review of the first book, Bulldog Drummond.

The Black Gang is the title of this outing, and the fact that the title refers to the hero and his friends rather than the villains indicates the ambivalent character of the book for the modern reader.

At the very beginning, the Black Gang capture a criminal villain and take him into their own custody, to be sent to a secret prison of their own. The police are aware of their activities, but not too concerned, as the “right sort of people” are disappearing.

The modern reader has a hard time with this sort of thing – though heaven knows we may be quickly moving into a state of nature where every man will again have to do what seems best in his own eyes.

Anyway, Bulldog Drummond, our intrepid hero, sets his sights on closing down the operation of the greatest criminal mastermind in the world (a Communist, which pleased me), and there are attacks back and forth, and kidnappings, and Drummond triumphs in the end.

Nothing very challenging. Nothing very plausible. There are some ethnic slurs (especially of Jews), but we’ve come to expect that sort of thing, haven’t we?

Mindless entertainment from a more innocent era. Cautions for racist elements.

Fiction, Uncategorized

‘One Final Dragon’

Leave a comment

Back in the early ’80s, I sold my first short story to Amazing Stories Magazine. It was called “One Final Dragon.”

Just yesterday, our friend Nathan James Norman posted a dramatic production of the story on his “Untold Podcast” site (with my permission, of course).

You can listen to it here.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Persons of Interest,’ and ‘In This Bright Future,’ by Peter Grainger

Leave a comment

A while ago I reviewed the first three D.C. Smith novels by Peter Grainger. I was happy to discover recently that there are now two more. I read them with pleasure and review them here.

The continuing hero, D.C. Smith, is an aging police detective in the fictional city of King’s Lake in England. He is utterly uninterested in career advancement, and has no personal life to speak of. For him it’s all about the work – our friend Gene Edward Veith might say he’s a man of his vocation, perhaps to excess.

One of D.C. Smith’s great strengths is the low profile he keeps. He’s physically unimpressive, and he purposely presents himself as less intelligent than he really is. His very nickname, “D.C.,” is a police rank (Detective Constable), but his actual title is Detective Sergeant. Thus from the very beginning he keeps the people he meets at a disadvantage, something he enjoys and exploits.

In Persons of Interest, a low-level convicted felon is murdered in prison, and Smith’s phone number is found among his effects. This is puzzling, as Smith has never met the man. Then a couple teenagers disappear, and it all comes together in an investigation that takes on ruthless and powerful gangsters.

In In This Bright Future Smith takes an excursion into his own past, or at least the ruins of that past. In his youth he served as a British spy in Belfast, North Ireland. There he failed to complete his mission and nearly got killed. Only now, while resting up from a leg injury, Smith receives a summons from the son of an old friend there, learning that a young man he’d liked, one who’d been promising and non-political, had disappeared the same night he fled the city. Smith goes back, impelled by a sense of obligation, once again adopts a false identity, and begins investigating what happened to the young man.

I like each D.C. Smith book better than the last. I’m particularly impressed to learn that author Grainger began in self-publishing – few writers in that field (and I include myself among them) rise to this high level of craftsmanship. Also the language is mild and though there’s much violence in the air, little actual violence happens on stage, largely because Smith is too smart to let it happen.

Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Boat Man,’ by Dustin Stevens

1 Comment

“The Boat Man” is the titular murderer’s own name for himself. He and another were the victims of a horrible crime some years ago, and now he’s back, having mastered patience and the use of a sword, to make the perpetrators understand exactly what they have put others through. And then die.

That’s the premise behind The Boat Man, written by Dustin Stevens, who is pretty good at thrillers if this book is any indication.

The hero of the story is Columbus, Ohio Detective Reed Mattox, who has suffered from PTSD since the death of his (female) partner. Since then he has withdrawn from human society generally. He manages to remain a cop through taking a K-9 partner (Billie, a Belgian Malinois) and working the night shift.

When the Boat Man murders begin, however, his superiors are forced by a manpower shortage to move him to the day shift and put his team in charge of the investigation. And gradually Reed begins to uncover a terrible injustice and a shameful cover-up.

Author Stevens creates good characters and believable situations. The writing is generally of pretty high quality, though some typos managed to survive into the final text. I liked the book a lot and recommend it.