Category Archives: Reviews

‘One Wilde Night,’ by Patrick Logan

Sometimes I read a book and I think, “This writer is following a formula.” Following a formula can even work, depending on how the writer fills in the blanks.

One Wilde Night by Patrick Logan works, but only on a technical level.

Tommy Wilde, our hero, has a PhD in biochemistry, but ended up running a crime scene clean-up business. He works mostly at night. He’s training a new employee one night when he gets a call for help from his loser brother Brian, a drug addict. Tommy runs to meet him – at their church – where Brian is panicking over the body of a drug dealer. The dealer – Brian says – just dropped dead. Not his fault.

Due to an overwhelming sense of obligation, Tommy helps Brian dispose of the body, while eluding the drug dealer’s associates. Or so he thinks. In fact, this is just the beginning of a long, long night in which Tommy will be beaten up, kidnapped, threatened and physically mutilated.

There’s a template for writing a thriller. Start by putting your character in a bad situation, then make it steadily worse. Turn every step forward into two steps back.

Author Logan dutifully follows this template. The problem is that at some point, if you raise the stakes enough, you start losing credibility. Everybody has bad nights, but nobody’s nights go that bad in this many ways. This is the sort of story logic you find in a thriller movie, but in a book the audience has more time to reflect and ask themselves, “Do I believe this?”

Even worse, One Wilde Night never really resolves any of Tommy’s problems. It ends in a cliff-hanger. In other words, what we have here isn’t even a whole story. It’s just the first chapter of a story.

And sure enough, there’s a whole series of Tommy Wilde stories to follow.

But I ain’t reading them.

I should note that the church and their priest come out looking good here, so the author at least seems friendly to Christianity. However, he also drops a whole lot of f-bombs.

All in all, not recommended.

‘Trilby,’ by George du Maurier

Well, that was an experience. I went ahead and followed my instinct to download George du Maurier’s novel Trilby, based on my weird fascination with the old John Barrymore movie, “Svengali.” I wasn’t prepared for the degree to which the book would grab me. It was one of those “hard to put it down” reading experiences.

My shame is great at being taken in like this by a Victorian bestseller, and not even a mystery or an adventure tale! A love melodrama, of all things.

Most oddly of all, though Trilby fascinated me, I can’t really recommend it to our readers. I have several objections to the thing.

As you may (or may not) be aware, Trilby is a story mostly about the lives of artists in Paris’ Latin Quarter in the 1850s. This novel’s extreme popularity established that time and place forever in the public mind as a colorful, freethinking milieu. Three British painters – the big war veteran Taffy, the jolly Laird, and the young, innocent Little Billee, share an atelier. There they meet a charming young woman, Trilby O’Ferrall, who is of Irish/Scottish parentage but has spent all her life in Paris. She works as an artist’s model and a washer woman. She’s beautiful, unaffected, uninhibited, and charming. They all fall in love with her to some extent, but Little Billee does most of all. However, he can’t handle the fact that she does nude modeling (“for the altogether,” as she puts it. This is where our phrase “in the altogether” originates), and is not chaste. In spite of his religious freethinking (much is made of that), he’s basically an upper middle-class boy.

Another member of their circle, though generally unwelcome, is Svengali, a Polish Jew and a brilliant musician. Svengali can play any instrument beautifully, except for his own voice. When he hears Trilby’s voice, he’s intrigued, but he soon learns that, though the sound itself is magnificent, she is utterly tone-deaf.

Eventually Billee overcomes his scruples and proposes marriage to Trilby. She agrees reluctantly. Although she reciprocates his love, she understands their social differences would doom their marriage. Soon after, Billee’s mother and sister come to visit, and his mother has a talk with Trilby, who agrees to break the engagement and disappears. Billee then suffers a breakdown which marks the end of his time in Paris. But his talent has now been recognized, and when he recovers, back in England, he is a famous and sought-after man.

Five years later, he, Taffy, and the Laird have a reunion in Paris. They’re surprised to learn that their old acquaintance Svengali is now the talk of Europe. He is famous as the manager of his beautiful wife, “la Svengali,” said to have the most ravishing voice in the world. The trio get tickets to her concert, and are almost – not quite – certain that la Svengali is in fact their old friend Trilby, whom they’d thought dead. When by chance they encounter the Svengali carriage on the street, both their old acquaintances pretend not to know them.

From there it all rolls on to a tragic conclusion, more drawn-out than in the film.

I said, in discussing the movie, that the cinematic Trilby reminds me of a girl I once cared about. It disturbed me, as I read, that Trilby in the book was even more like the girl I knew than the actress (though my girl did not share Trilby’s sexual mores). On top of that, elements in the story took me back to my college days. I think it was a feeling that, in some ways, I was reading about my own life that gripped me as I read Trilby.

But you, Kind Reader, never knew that girl. And you (probably) weren’t there when I was in college. So I have no reason to think you’d react to this book as I did.

For one thing, it’s Victorian literature – that is to say, overwritten. Du Maurier isn’t a horrible over-writer like so many Victorians; often he can be amusing in his frequent digressions. (By the way, there’s a lot of French dialogue in this book, so it helps if you have decent French. Which I don’t). But he does take his time telling the story. This isn’t just a narrative; it’s sort of a leisurely travelogue.

But my main objections are moral and theological. This was a somewhat scandalous book in its time – “Read about all the naughty things they get up to in Paris!” Trilby isn’t a virgin for much the same reason that a girl in the South Sea islands wouldn’t be a virgin. It’s alien to her culture. Du Maurier may have been challenging Victorian sexual mores here, but he keeps it oblique.

Much worse is the antisemitism. A lot has been written over the years about Svengali as a Jewish stereotype. Which he certainly is. He’s arrogant, selfish, grasping, and filthy (an odd accusation to make against any Jew, when you think about it). The passages concerning Svengali are frankly horrifying. However, fortunately, Svengali isn’t in the book as much as in the movie.

It should also be noted that there are several Jewish characters in Trilby, and the others are rather nice.

Even worse, from my perspective, are the theological digressions. The author takes several opportunities to have his characters contemplate – or discover – the complete absurdity of Christian doctrine. Everyone who thinks about it (in this book) soon agrees that the Judeo-Christian God is ridiculous and there is no Hell to fear. Either everyone is saved or everyone just goes to sleep. Nothing to worry about, as long as you do good.

So I don’t really know what to tell you about Trilby. It might fascinate you as it fascinated me. Very likely it won’t. If you do read it, you’ll have to wade through some nasty spots, but there are also many rewards.

‘The Case of the Headless Billionaire,’ by Michael Leese

Roper’s memory had cinematic qualities. He could call up the past and watch it like a TV show. If that wasn’t astonishing enough, he had also revealed another factor. His recall mirrored the technology of the moment. This meant his early memories appeared as if on a VHS tape, while the more recent ones were in digital format. Hooley had once speculated that had Roper been born a hundred years earlier his memories would have been on a flickering black-and-white film reel.

A standard scene in a detective mystery – if it’s not a plain police procedural (a very good thing of another kind) – calls for the master sleuth to stand in a room surrounded by lesser men, as he sees things they don’t see and makes mental connections they can’t make. They often think he’s crazy, until he explains his deductions. From Sherlock Holmes to Hercule Poirot to Monk, this has been a set piece.

So it wasn’t much of a jump, once we became aware of the existence of autistic savants, to come up with an autistic detective. I’ve encountered several examples. Jonathan Roper, hero of Michael Leese’s The Case of the Headless Billionaire, is one of them, and it’s not a bad effort.

When a billionaire philanthropist disappears, Chief Inspector Brian Hooley is assigned to the case. The man vanished into a London crowd in broad daylight, and the police are baffled. Considering the difficulty of the case, Insp. Hooley asks to get Jonathan Roper assigned to assist. Roper is on suspension, having nearly ruined an earlier investigation through his artless honesty. Roper is on the autistic spectrum, and other detectives find him hard to work with. But Hooley has always gotten along with him, managing to adjust to his eccentricities. He treats him as a sort of substitute son.

Roper is the right man for the job. In his time off, he’s been working on his social skills, and he’s learning to ask for explanations of “normal” behavior. He’s also constructing a new way of organizing his own memories, making his deductions more efficient.

Their investigations will lead to corruption in the medical research field, and to human smugglers (human smugglers sure show up in a lot of stories these days. I wish the authorities paid as much attention to them as authors do). The detectives’ lives, as well as those of many innocents, will hang on the efficiency of Jonathan Roper’s remarkable brain.

I liked The Case of the Headless Billionaire. The writing wasn’t bad, and the characters were okay. I won’t say this was a masterful book, but it did the job it set out to do, and I was interested in Hooley and Roper. The issue of fetal stem cell research played a part in the story, but it was framed in a way that sidestepped the controversial issue of whether it’s morally acceptable in the first place.

Worth reading.

[Note: I discover, on searching our files, that I reviewed this book once before under its previous title, Going Underground. I’m surprised I didn’t recognize it, and can only attribute this to old age. But I liked it better this time around.]

‘Impression,’ by Ray Clark

Sometimes I hate a book enough to read it all through just so I can tell you in detail how bad it was. That was the case with Impression, by Ray Clark. I’ve read worse novels, but few combined inept writing with such personal offense to myself.

Detective Inspector Stewart Gardener and his partner Sean Riley are the heroes of this police procedural, part of a series set in Leeds in North Yorkshire. When a local prostitute is found dead in her kitchen, stabbed to death with a bayonet, and then a local businessman is found choked to death with sealing wax (!) in a butcher shop doorway, their investigation begins. That investigation, to this reader, seemed a remarkably ham-handed one. A local online journalist comes to them with a theory that these murders are recreations of historical murders in the area. They laugh him off, with tragic results. Also, when a couple whose daughter was recently kidnapped show up on their radar, they treat the two with surprising insensitivity – largely because the husband is a born-again Christian, and so (in their eyes) contemptible.

This hatred for born-again Christians comes up again and again in the book. Author Clark wants to make sure we’re in no doubt how he feels on the subject. “Real practicing Christians,” DI Gardener states authoritatively, “see the born-again converts as part-timers—people who are not really taking the Lord and the good book seriously.” Further on, Riley says that the fact that a man is a born-again Christian “tells me that he is hiding from something in his past.” That’s an odd way, in an English book, of dismissing John Wesley, John Newton, and William Booth, among so many others.

But my complaints aren’t only theological. The author is lazy. His characters never come to life, and most of them are hard to keep straight. He misuses the term “begging the question,” and is prone to misplacing modifiers and misusing words, as in the line, “Despite being still in the throes of summer, [a character] was dressed in a camel hair coat and trilby….”

One major plot point involves a child, decades ago, playing constantly with a Polaroid instant camera. However, we’re also told that the child’s family was very poor. Apparently the author has no idea what Polaroid film used to cost.

Finally, the climax was melodramatic and implausible.

The book made a poor Impression on this reviewer.

‘The Blood Line,’ by Solomon Carter

Another free book by an author I’m not familiar with. I think this is the fourth in the string. I’ve disliked each book less than the last, and The Blood Line by Solomon Carter was the best so far. Not stellar, but not bad.

Aging Detective Inspector Joe Hogarth of Southend in Essex, England, is summoned to a very nasty crime scene with his two female colleagues. The deceased has been dead several days, and decomposition is well under way. The dead man was known as a forger, specializing in false passports and other IDs. The method of the murder is interesting – first the man was given a powerful “speedball” injection of cocaine and heroin, and then he was stabbed to death before the drugs could kill him. Why would anyone take the trouble to do all that?

Before long another local criminal, a human trafficker, is found murdered exactly the same way. This is obviously personal for the killer, but who could that person be? The field of possible suspects is wide; the problem is finding the person with the right kind of hate.

Joe Hogarth is a sort of a sad sack – middle-aged, never married, lonely but scared of commitment. Instead of taking risks in dating, he medicates himself with alcohol. Meanwhile, an old enemy of his has been released from prison. All unknown to Hogarth, this psychopath has come to town and is laying plans to repay him for all the time he spent behind bars.

I thought The Blood Line was well-written. Joe Hogarth is a good character, and not politically correct; I was interested in him. My only real objection, though, is a big one – the story is kind of dreary. Hogarth has a dreary life, and little hope is in view. Maybe things will get better in the next books in the series.

Otherwise, pretty good. Cautions for the usual.

‘The Cold Trail,’ by J. C. Fields

I’ve been reading a lot of free books made available through various Kindle promotions lately. As you may have noticed, I wasn’t entirely happy with the last couple I reviewed. Was J. C. Fields’ The Cold Trail more satisfying?

Well, yes. But not entirely.

This book is part of a series, and there were the usual problems with character relationships that had to be explained, but that wasn’t handled too badly. The story begins with the disappearance, a few years back, of three female volleyball players from a college in Missouri. A few years later, our hero, Sean Kruger, a professor at another Missouri college, is able to rescue a different volleyball player. Kruger is a former FBI agent, and he worked on the earlier abductions. The similarities prompt him to get his hacker friend to do some checking in the records, and he believes he can discern the work of a serial killer. Because of this he makes up his mind to go back to his old job at the FBI, which assigns him to the case.

Eventually he and his team are able learn that one thing connects a number of disappearances of female athletes over recent years. In each case, a particular software company was installing a system in the college at the time. And the man overseeing the installation was the son of the company’s owner, computer mogul Robert Burns, who recently retired as a senator. The son in question was Robert Jr., “Bobby,” and he has just been elected to his father’s old seat. Is it possible a US senator is a serial killer?

Of course it’s possible, and much money has been spent on covering up Bobby’s “indiscretions.” But it goes far deeper than that. We’re talking about the Russian mafia and international human trafficking.

The story worked pretty well. The characters were interesting, and they interacted well. The dialogue was good. The book could have used a proofreader – I found misplaced modifiers and word confusion (like “vanilla folder”). But as a narrative, it wasn’t bad. I caught what looked to me like one plot weakness, but that happens.

My reservations were mostly political and paranoid.

The evil senator is, of course, a conservative Republican. And he is owned, part and parcel, by Vladimir Putin and the Russians, who are using him to destabilize the US economy.

It occurred to me that Robert Burns might be a stand-in for Donald Trump in a left-wing fantasy.

Also, we got to watch the FBI at work investigating a senator, and they cut legal corners from time to time. Nothing sinister about the squeaky-clean FBI illegally surveilling a Republican, right?

Also, the bureaucrats in this book never worry about wokeness. There’s no concern over microaggressions, and nobody talks about their preferred pronouns. I did not believe this was true to contemporary life in the federal government.

All in all, The Cold Trail left me with chilly feet.

But the writing wasn’t bad.

‘One Other,’ by Lewis M. Penry

Writing a story (of any length, but novels are hardest in this respect) presents many challenges, and it’s a surprise any of us ever gets it tolerably right (I’m not saying I get it right myself; that’s for others to determine). You’ve got to cobble together an interesting plot, and then you’ve got to cat-herd your characters into doing the (sometimes outrageous) stuff they need to do in order to keep common sense from breaking out. A story implies unusual activity, and unusual activity usually means forcing characters to do extreme stuff. This can be done well or badly. I felt it was done rather badly in Lewis M. Penry’s One Other, second in his DS Jerome Roberts police procedural series.

Dr. Ben Carr is one-half of a medical practice in the London suburb of Shefford. He’s a family man and football (soccer) coach. Apparently popular with his neighbors – so why did someone stab him to death in his home?

Detective Sergeant Jerome Roberts, along with his superior DI Richard Martin, starts questioning neighbors and friends, and a darker picture of him emerges. Dr. Carr seems to have had his share of enemies – there’s his business partner (whom he’s been blackmailing), and the families of female students he’s been sleeping with. There’s the football mom who threatened him publicly for not putting her son into a game. There’s his own brother, too.

As police pressure increases, the suspects respond violently, turning on one another, and even on themselves. The whole thing erupts in a series of homicides.

And that’s my problem with this book. This isn’t supposed to be grand opera or Shakespearean tragedy. It’s a story about ordinary middle class citizens in a suburb. No doubt they’re all sinners like the rest of us, but (it seems to me) the author overestimates the capacity of the average person for deadly force. Killing another human is the first and most stubborn taboo. It takes serious fear, trauma, or specialized training to get past that taboo. Communities don’t just break out in murder like an epidemic of chickenpox.

One Other fell down, for this reader, in the psychology department. I simply didn’t believe the story.

You may feel differently.

‘The Defendant,’ by G. K. Chesterton

The poor—the slaves who really stoop under the burden of life—have often been mad, scatter-brained and cruel, but never hopeless. That is a class privilege, like cigars. Their drivelling literature will always be a ‘blood and thunder’ literature, as simple as the thunder of heaven and the blood of men.

On a friend’s recommendation, I picked up the Project Gutenberg version of G. K. Chesterton’s The Defendant. (My link, of course, is to a version you’ll have to pay for. You think we’re running a charity here?) It’s pretty standard Chesterton, which is to say, eccentrically stimulating.

The book’s title, as the author himself admits in the Foreword, is awkwardly put. Chesterton does not stand in his own defense here, but in defense of various topics he has chosen for no other reason than that they’re out of fashion (or were at the time). Subjects include: “Penny Dreadful” novels, skeletons, publicity, nonsense, “ugly things,” slang, detective stories, and patriotism. It helps, in reading, to have some general idea of intellectual fashions around the turn of the 20th Century. Although Christianity is mentioned, this is not one of Chesterton’s most Christian (or Catholic) works.

The Defendant isn’t one of the most memorable books in G. K.’s ouvre, but it’s definitely worth reading. There are excellent moments:

“There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorne says the best and wittiest thing about the spring.”

“Scripture says that one star differeth from another in glory, and the same conception applies to noses.”

‘Quick Service,’ by P. G. Wodehouse

The inner office was, however, empty when Joss entered. It was only after he had banged cheerfully on the desk with a paperweight, at the same time shouting a jovial “Bring out your dead,” that Mr. Duff came in from the little balcony outside the window, where he had been attempting to alleviate his dyspepsia by deep breathing.

“Aha, J. B.,” said Joss sunnily. “Good morrow.”

“Oh, you’re there are you?” said Mr. Duff, making no attempt to emulate his junior’s effervescence.

The managing director of Duff and Trotter was a large man who, after an athletic youth, had allowed himself to put on weight. In his college days he had been a hammer thrower of some repute, and he was looking as if he wished he had a hammer now and could throw it at Joss….

“You’re late!” he boomed.

“Not really,” said Joss.

“What the devil do you mean, not really?”

“A man like me always seems to be later than he is. That is because people sit yearning for him….”

The first book of P. G. Wodehouse I ever bought was the collection The Most of P. G. Wodehouse, published by Simon & Schuster back in the ‘70s, which included the novel Quick Service as a sort of extra (it remains the most reasonably priced way to get this book, so that’s the link I’m using). Thus, Quick Service was the first Wodehouse novel I ever read. I enjoyed it immensely then, and did again on re-reading. Especially because its main character is surprisingly different from most of your Wodehouse heroes.

The plot of the story is extremely tight and complex, but cutting back to the essentials, we start at Claines Hall in Sussex, which now belongs to Mrs. Howard Steptoe, an American millionairess, and her husband. Also in residence is her poor relation, Sally Fairmile, who serves as a sort of secretary. Sally has just gotten engaged to young Lord Holbeton, another guest at the manor. The problem is that under the terms of his father’s will, Lord Holbeton can’t touch his inheritance yet without the approval of his trustee, Mr. J. B. Duff of Duff and Trotter’s exclusive grocery store in London. Sally suggests that she go talk to Mr. Duff, and see if she can’t charm him.

But when she arrives at Duff’s office, she finds not him but our hero, Joss Weatherby, an artist who works in the advertising department. Joss immediately falls in love with her. When she’s gone, Duff reappears, having learned, through eavesdropping, that Joss painted a portrait of a Mrs. Chavender, which now hangs at Claines Hall (where Mrs. Chavender just happens to be a current guest). Duff was once engaged to Mrs. Chavender, he says, and it occurs to him that her face, with its haughty sneer, would make a wonderful poster for the store. He then fires Joss, but Joss heads off to Claines Hall, to take a job as Mr. Steptoe’s valet (a job that Sally mentioned is open). His plan is to steal the portrait, get his job back, and marry Sally.

There may be other heroes like Joss Weatherby in other Wodehouse stories (my memory sometimes fails, and there are a lot of stories), but such an energetic, bright, confident type isn’t the Master’s usual fare. Uncle Fred and Uncle Galahad were probably something like this in their youths. “Aplomb” is the word that best suits Joss. It makes no difference whether he’s discovered swilling his boss’s sherry, breaking into a French window, or perched on a chair, cutting a painting from its frame, he is never dismayed. His self-confidence only ebbs in those moments when he contemplates his unworthiness of the woman he loves. And then only briefly. Joss Weatherby is a great tonic for the depressive reader.

Quick Service is a tremendous story, and everyone should read it.

‘Coyote Fork,’ by James Wilson

I opened my eyes again. Ridiculous. The truth—as the last half hour had demonstrated beyond doubt—was that the war was lost. And yet here I was, so trapped in the habit of writing, that I was already trying to find the words to explain to someone who would never read them why no one would ever read them.

Dale Nelson reviewed this book in the Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, comparing it to That Hideous Strength. I bought it on the strength of that. Coyote Fork is a very different book from THS, but a fascinating parallel read.

Robert Lovelace is an English journalist who used to make his living as a travel writer. But that livelihood is gone, destroyed by social media. His last, desperate bid for writing work is an assignment to go to Silicon Valley and report on the roll-out of TOLSTOY, the latest brain-child of social media mogul Evan Bone (whom Robert blames for the loss of his job). TOLSTOY is supposed to represent a whole new level of Artificial Intelligence, one in which computers will be creating their own stories. Robert can only take so much of this, and rushes outside at last for fresh air.

In the parking lot, he sees Anne Grainger, his ex-girlfriend, who’s supposed to be in England. She’s another victim of Bone’s empire – after rediscovering her Christian faith in mid-life, she was cancelled for her thought crimes in a thoroughgoing way by Global Village, Evan Bone’s social media empire. She fled into hiding, her reputation ruined.

Back in his hotel room, Robert gets the news – Anne is dead. She killed herself, and she was nowhere near California at the time.

The vision, or visitation, of Anne leaves Robert with a single resolve. He’s going to discover the secretive Evan Bone’s true story, and tell it to the world. Give him a dose of his own medicine. Destroy the destroyer. His quest will take him to Coyote Fork, the abandoned site of a 1970s hippie commune, where it turns out Evan grew up. There’s a standard popular narrative about Coyote Fork, and then there’s the true story, which only a few people dare to tell.

Along the way, Robert will be joined in his quest by Ruth Halassian, a scholar who shares his passion – and might share his future. But the real secret of Coyote Fork lies with the local Indians, and they don’t tell their story to just anyone.

Coyote Fork is really not very similar to That Hideous Strength, except in certain themes related to the abuse of science and technology. Robert is a little like Mark Studdock in some ways. But this story is much simpler (which will relieve many readers). Where THS is explicitly Christian, Coyote Fork is more ambivalent – not anti-Christian is the best I can say on that. Where Christianity comes up, it fares pretty well, but the real truth in this story (to the extent that there is a truth) seems to be hidden among the pre-Christian Indians. The final resolution seemed ambivalent at first, but became clear once I’d thought about it.

All that said, Coyote Fork is expertly written, fascinating, and disturbing. I recommend it. Cautions for adult stuff and rough language.