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Great Scott

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Fort Snelling in 1844. Today the trees are so thick and high all around that you can’t see the river from the fort.

On Independence Day I took an out of town visitor to see Historic Fort Snelling, our major local historical site, which has been reconstructed to appear as it did around 1820, and is staffed by costumed interpreters. I’m glad I did, because I came up with a couple article ideas which I don’t intend to squander on you lot of freeloaders, but to sell to The American Spectator Online (or so I hope).

The temperature was officially 101º, which gave us a vivid lesson in life before air conditioning (consumer report—it was bloody uncomfortable). But at least I wasn’t marching around in a wool uniform like the support staff. (We Vikings generally wear linen tunics in the summer, even though they’re not strictly vouched for by archaeology. Those authenticity officers know there’s a point beyond which you can’t push a guy with an axe.)

The main problem with Fort Snelling is that it’s not all that memorable, in historical terms. Nothing big really ever happened there. Graf von Zeppelin spent some time there as an observer, before going home to invent the dirigible. General Custer cooled his heels there for a while in temporary disgrace, before being called back west for his Date with Destiny.



Dred Scott. Continue reading Great Scott →

Authors

On Ray Bradbury

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Stephen Andrew Hiltner, a fact-checker for The Paris Review, talks about working on the journal’s interview of Ray Bradbury. “[W]hat I found in the interview were things that had escaped me for much of my undergraduate and graduate years—years spent earning a supposedly literary education. He promotes friendship, love, self-discovery, the daily intake of poetry. He instructs us to read from every kind of literature we feel drawn to…. He talks about the ‘fiction of ideas’…” And there’s a story about the author’s life-long inspiration which cannot be verified and yet must be true.

Authors, Writing

Stamina, Willpower

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Novelist Haruki Murakami writes, “Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day.” He says it’s important to push yourself to create your vision and to train yourself to push.

Fiction, Reviews

Jeff Shelby’s Noah Braddock novels

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I reviewed Jeff Shelby’s Killer Swell a while back, and reported my surprise at finding such quality in a novel about a surfer detective, something that just struck my prejudices as inevitably lightweight.

Recently I got the opportunity to pick up Drift Away free or very cheap (I forget which) for Kindle, and I read that. It turned out to be a minor mistake. The problem is that Drift Away is the fourth novel in the series, and a very important character had died in the third novel. So that was spoiled for me.

Nevertheless, I went back and bought two and three, Wicked Break and Liquid Smoke.

And my conclusion is that Shelby is a very good author indeed, producing a substantial series here. Noah Braddock, the hero, is a tough guy with serious life issues (his mother is an alcoholic and his felon father abandoned them). But he works hard to live with integrity and be useful through his detective work (which, it must be admitted, he only does when he feels like it). He’s capable of great empathy and great courage. There’s a mix of nobility and cynicism in his character that’s worthy of classic hard-boiled. His relationship with his dangerous giant friend, Carter, is great buddy stuff.

The direction Shelby chose to take in the third Noah Braddock novel raised it, in my opinion, to the level of tragedy, and Drift Away, which entirely alters the setting, follows that up very effectively.

I found a few flaws; homonym errors and a tendency to fall back on stock (minor) characters and detective story tropes. But all in all I was most impressed, and sometimes genuinely moved.

As usual, cautions for language, violence, and adult situations.

Fiction, Reviews

Two Shots, by Joe Albert

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For e-book readers only, here’s a mystery with the chops to go up against the big guys in the outdoor thriller genre. It’s not without weaknesses, but it’s a solid book and well worth the minimal price.

Two Shots begins with the assassination by sniper, at a Minnesota deer hunting camp, of a Republican political operative. Game warden Tony Leach, a former Minneapolis policeman, is among the first on the scene, but it’s properly a police matter. Only, as time passes, nothing seems to be happening in the case, and some clues Tony himself reported aren’t being followed up. Then Tony’s superior asks him to do some poking around on his own, at the request of someone high up in state government.

Tony’s tracking and detective skills make it possible for him to begin finding answers where no one else has. But some people don’t want the answers found, and they’ll do anything—anything at all—to keep the truth from coming to light.

Author Joe Albert, a Minnesota outdoors writer, seems to know his stuff when he writes about nature. But he handles human beings pretty well too. Tony Leach is a good, solid hero, and his supporting characters also come to life. The neighborhood of Bemidji, Minnesota is described with loving attention. Albert’s prose slips from time to time (he refers to “a smattering of homes” at one point, for instance), but generally it’s good, plain writing and does the job. I always like to promote a readable Minnesota author, and Joe Albert is one.

A particular delight (for me) was that, although Albert doesn’t rant much on political issues, he had the courage to make one of the villains a high ranking Minnesota Democrat. You don’t see bad Democrats very often in fiction. But let’s face it, if there’s a machine in Minnesota, it’s a Democratic machine, and that’s where you’re going to see most of the corruption.

I recommend Two Shots, with moderate cautions for language and subject matter.

Fiction, Reviews

To Speak for the Dead, by Paul Levine

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In the opening novel of a series of legal thrillers that appears to be doing quite well (and deservedly, judging from this volume), To Speak for the Dead by Paul Levine introduces the character of Miami lawyer Jake Lassiter (I don’t like the name; sounds too much like the hero of a cowboy movie). Jake is a former football player with a self-deprecating sense of humor that adds a lot of charm to his narration.

When the story begins he’s defending a surgeon from a malpractice charge in the death of a successful real estate developer who left behind a seductive young wife. Jake gets him off, but he’s soon defending him against murder charges in the same case, and a complicated (I’m pretty sure I still don’t understand it all) plot unfolds, involving greed, obsession, and lots of kinky sex. There’s also a heartbreaking subplot concerning a romantic near-miss, which adds considerable depth to the story. And the ending was pretty chilling.

I enjoyed reading To Speak for the Dead. A few hints suggested to me that the author’s politics are considerably to the left of mine, but that wasn’t intrusive at all. Jake was sometimes more imprudent than I found plausible, but those mistakes were there to set up action, so I can’t complain much.

Recommended, with the usual cautions for language and adult themes.

Fiction, Reviews

Falling Up the Stairs, by James Lileks

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You’re probably aware that I’m a major fan of Minneapolis writer James Lileks (though you probably don’t know—because I’ve been so discreet about it—that I once did a half hour of radio with him in studio). So when he re-released his first novel, Falling Up the Stairs, as a Kindle book I snapped it right up.

How shall I express my reaction? It’s not a bad book. If you’re a fan of Lileks, you’re likely to get a lot of entertainment from it, as I did.

But it’s not a particularly good novel.

It suffers from a congenital disorder of first novels—too much showing off. The author is eager to throw everything in, to demonstrate his range and complexity. And this being Lileks, the range is broad and the complexity variegated.

But the book can’t figure out what it wants to be, and the reader ends up with narrative whiplash.

The story’s narrator is Jonathan Simpson, who when we meet him is “social editor” of a newspaper in a small Minnesota town. He’s depressed because his career is going nowhere and his girlfriend (whose career is going somewhere) has left him to move to New York.

His life gets quickly shaken up when, almost all at once, he gets fired from his job and learns that he has inherited a Minneapolis mansion from his eccentric aunt, whom he never much liked. He drives to the city in his AMC Pacer, throws his parasite cousin out of the house, and comforts his senile butler and motherly cook. Then a series of fatal poisonings begin, the work of a health food terrorist group (!)

You may have intuited the problem. You start with a comic premise and comic characters (I thought the beginning fully worthy of Wodehouse), and slide into terrorism and the death of the innocent. Wodehouse morphs into Saki, who becomes James Patterson. I’m not saying such a transition is impossible, but it’s pretty hard, and a debut soloist should probably stick to one or two octaves.

There’s also a serious problem with the classic Kindle formatting glitches. Lileks announced the other day on his blog that he was pulling the book temporarily to fix the problems, but it’s still up on Amazon. So I’m not sure what you’ll be getting if you buy it today. My copy had serious problems with paragraph breaks in the wrong places, something that interferes with dialogue passages. There were also a couple points where stretches of text got duplicated.

So I can’t wholeheartedly recommend Falling Up the Stairs. On the other hand it’s only three bucks for the e-book, and it’s Lileks, so it’s probably still good value for money.

Publishing

Interview with Keith Urbahn

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Coffee and Markets talks to Keith Urbahn about his new firm, Javelin, and publishing conservative authors. “As the only full-service book writing and publicity firm in the nation’s capital, Javelin is the first of its kind,” says Urbahn’s LinkedIn bio, “offering concrete, multi-channel services from crisis communications and social networking solutions to speech and book writing.”

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S.D. Smith is the Story Warren

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“There are imaginative tales burrowing into our children’s hearts, past the ‘watchful dragons’ of their minds, to inform who they are at the deepest levels. . . . We want to serve you as you seek to foster holy imagination in the children you love.” Smith rallies an admirable team to write some good, good stuff.