Fiction, Reviews

‘Cocktail Time,’ by P.G. Wodehouse

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P.G. Wodehouse wrote five novels (as well as a timeless short story) about the Earl of Ickenham, better known as Uncle Fred. Cocktail Time is the third in the series, placing the sequence somewhat later in time than I expected. One always envisions Wodehouse stories taking place in the 1920s or ’30s, but references here to television and World War II being in the past alert us to the fact that this one was actually published in 1958.

Instead of a précis of the plot, I think it will be more efficient to describe the story geographically. Imagine Dovetail Hammer, Berkshire, the stately home of Johnny Pearce, one of Uncle Fred’s godsons. Johnny wants very much to get married, but he doesn’t feel he can afford it. He’s not very wealthy, and upkeep on the manor is high. On top of that, he feels obligaed to pension off his imperious childhood nurse, who’s gotten accustomed to thinking of herself as major domo of the estate. He can’t expect his new bride to deal with that.

One measure he’s taken to increase his income is to turn Hammer Lodge, a smaller dwelling on the estate, into a rental house. It is now being occupied by Sir Raymond “Beefy” Bastable, the eminent London barrister. Beefy’s great secret, known to few, is that he is the author of Cocktail Time, a scandalous bestselling novel about today’s dissipated young men. (He wrote the novel after having his hat knocked off by a Brazil nut shot from a catapult (slingshot) out of a window of the Drones Club, unaware that the actual shooter was not a dissipated young man, but Uncle Fred himself). Beefy has persuaded his worthless nephew, Cosmo Wisdom, to take public credit for authorship, in order to preserve his own reputation. However, he has taken the precaution of writing a letter establishing his own authorship, in case it should be necessary. And now that his agent has started talking about film rights, Beefy is reconsidering his claim – only the letter has been stolen.

This covers only the high points. There are several cases of sundered hearts in this tale, and Uncle Fred is always keen on uniting sundered hearts, as part of his general life project of “spreading sweetness and light.” His usual method of spreading s. and l. is by telling bald-faced, shameless lies, gently shepherding the unhappy couples into proximity, and arranging for them to acquire sufficient resources to set up housekeeping. A novelty in this story is that several of the sundered couples consist of middle-aged people.

Lots of fun. Cocktail Time is about mid-level on the Wodehouse scale, which exists on an infinitely higher plane than any other humorist’s work. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

Saga reading report: ‘The Saga of the People of Floi’

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It occurred to me just today that I owe you a saga reading report. I read one from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, as is my custom, during the Elk Horn Iowa event, and I forgot to tell you about it. This one was ‘The Saga of the People of Floi’ (Flóamanna saga). It’s not an example of high saga art, but it does not lack for interesting moments.

Although (like so many sagas) it starts with an overview of several generations of genealogy, its unquestioned hero is a man with the complex name of Thorgil Scar-leg’s-stepson (Ørrabeinsstjúps). (Among his ancestors is Aslaug, wife of Ragnar Lodbrok, whom fans of the Vikings TV series will recall). Thorgils satisfies the requirements for young saga heroes by going abroad to have adventures which are suspiciously similar to the adventures of other saga heroes (though at one point a man named Olmod the Old Karrason shows up, whom you may recall as a character in my novel The Year of the Warrior. This is the only non-Heimskringla reference to Olmod I’ve ever seen).

Then, having won the daughter of a king of Ireland as a wife, Thorgils returns in triumph to his home in Iceland. (The author has him generously bestow this Irish wife on a friend, to clear the deck for another wife, probably more historical.) There’s also an intriguing incident involving a “tub-duel,” where two men get into a large tub and fight with clubs – though Thorgils himself brings a sword, which is decisive if not very sporting.

We are informed that Thorgils was an early convert to Christianity, and later followed Erik the Red to the new Greenland colony. The stories involving Thorgils’ faith smell a little off to me, especially one where, during his Greenland voyage, Thor appears to him and demands a sacrifice. Thorgils refuses. Then he realizes that he has an ox that belongs to Thor on board, and so he throws it overboard. (That strikes me as an account of an actual maritime sacrifice, revised in spin doctor mode to satisfy a Christian audience.)

His ship is wrecked in Greenland, and he and his party suffer greatly before they can get help from other settlers. When Thorgils’ wife dies leaving him with a baby boy, he performs an action that has endeared him to feminist saga scholars ever since (Jane Smiley references it in The Greenlanders): he cuts his nipple, squeezing out first blood, then serum, then milk. And so he nurses his own son, to whom (we are told) he was particularly devoted thereafter.

In the end he can’t get along with Erik the Red (understandably), and returns to Iceland, dying a bitter and poor old man.

The Saga of the People of Floi is comparable to the Saga of Egil Skalagrimsson in telling a lively story about an unpleasant man. But it lacks the artistry of that work (which was very likely written by Snorri Sturlusson himself). Nevertheless, it’s both intriguing and highly memorable.

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The Nowak test

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Photo credit: Frederick Wallace. Unsplash license.

One of the many personal characteristics that make me such a bore is that I get almost no pleasure whatever from a job well done. Today I crossed two items off my “to do” list, things I’d been working up to for about a week. In intervals. When I wasn’t coughing or having a lie-down to recoup my strength. (I’m getting better, thanks to antibiotics, but it’s a process.)

And not a morsel of satisfaction does my frontal cortex vouchsafe me. I’ve heard of people being gratified by a job well done, but I’ve almost never had the experience.

Enough about that.

Like most of us, I’ve been thinking about the murder of Henry Nowak in Southampton, England recently. Everybody has a lesson to draw from it. Here’s mine:

Lots of us have wondered, over the years, how we would have stood up – morally – in Nazi Germany. Would we have defied the Nazis? Kept our heads down and our mouths shut? Knuckled under and collaborated?

I think we can be sure of one thing.

If you’re okay with a system that treats race as a moral category, you would not have defied the Nazis. If you think you can judge a person by the color of their skin, and that the authorities should too, you would not have defied the Nazis.

Now the fact that you (or I) can’t accept such a system doesn’t prove that you (or I) would actually be a Bonhoeffer. Things get real quite fast when your life’s on the actual line.

But if you can’t even agree that justice ought to be colorblind, you’re on the Field Gray side of things.

Fiction, Reviews

‘High Country Nocturne,’ by Jon Talton

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I wrote last night that I’ve given up reading author Jon Talton, so this will be my final review of any of his David Mapstone books. I’m tempted to call it ironic that, the more Talton’s books “improve” (at least in the sense of marketability), the less I like them. But it’s not ironic at all. It’s entirely proportionate, since marketability doesn’t matter much to me. (As sales of my own novels demonstrate.)

David Mapstone, you’ll recall, is a former academic historian, later recruited as “sheriff’s department historian” (cold case detective) in Maricopa County, Arizona. In the last book his boss and mentor, Mike Peralta, lost his job as sheriff and became a private detective, and David came to work for him.

In High Country Nocturne, Mike is suddenly a fugitive. Working as a diamond courier, he has been recorded on surveillance video shooting another guard and absconding with the jewels. David doesn’t believe it’s true, and starts to investigate, but he’s coopted by the slimy new sheriff, who pressures him into researching an old unsolved death.

But soon he finds himself and his wife under attack by an assassin, and his wife ends up in the hospital, close to death.

If I were Jon Talton’s agent or editor, I’m pretty sure I’d be delighted with the trajectory this series is taking. David Mapstone started out as a competent but slightly nebbishy deputy, more scholar than fighter. As the books have gone on, he’s become more formidable, a genuine avenger. All the stakes have been raised. The suspense is greater, the violence fiercer, the explosions louder. As is the case with so many detective series, the thriller element is now emphasized.

Also, the mild political conservatism of the early books has morphed into repeated expressions of contempt for the right.

A continuing, melancholy theme of the David Mapstone books has been his expressions of (certainly sincere) sadness about the changes in his community. As one of those few Phoenix residents who remembers how the place was before the real estate boom, he mourns all the things that have been lost – farms and ranches and floral gardens and open desert, now all subdivided and paved over.

On a much smaller scale, I mourn the decline (subjectively, for me) of this detective series, which started well, but seems to have sold out to sensationalism.

Fiction, Reviews

‘South Phoenix Rules,’ by Jon Talton

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I’ll begin this review by disclosing that I have decided to stop reading Jon Talton, whom I originally liked very much. I’ll explain my reasons below. Two more reviews are coming, however (this one and the next), because I like the author enough that it was hard to make the break. However, he ticks me off in a couple ways.

The first way is that he jerks his readers around by way of soap opera-style drama in his hero’s, David Maphouse’s, romantic life. As South Phoenix Rules begins, we find that his wife Lindsey, with whom he was blissfully happy the last time we looked, is now working out of town and pondering divorce. To complicate matters more, her long-lost, bad-girl sister Robin is now living in David’s house (at Lindsey’s insistence) and flirting heavily with him.

Then Robin receives a FedEx delivery that I won’t describe to you, which sets David – who has just resigned as a Maricopa County sheriff’s deputy – to investigating the drug business in and around Phoenix. This is the darkest, most violent story in the series to date, with David going full vigilante. There’s also a shocking murder that changes the shape of the whole series scenario.

The second reason I’ve grown annoyed with author Talton is his repeated assertion that the Tea Party, and anyone concerned about the border, must be motivated by pure racism. He seems to prefer a situation where white employers exploit underpaid foreign labor, undercutting wages for poor Americans of all races. I’m not saying it’s not a debatable and complex issue. I’m just tired of his simplistic, libelous assertions.

But I’m reading one more book, and I’ll probably review that tomorrow. No more after that.

Reading, Religion

How to Develop a Precocious Mind

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Young writer Bethel McGrew describes growing up with scholarly parents in a house of ten thousand books.

The ideological benefits of homeschooling are obvious, but besides these I’m moved to reflect on this simple freedom of time—time to train my attention on good and beautiful and difficult things, to furnish my mind with them at my own pace. I have sadly lost some of that gift of attention in the digital age. I flip through a decades-old memo pad logging all the books I read in a given year, in between the little to-do lists I would make for an afternoon of reading, chess study, or whatever else nine-year-old me was working on, and I’m filled with envy.

Bethel is a good columnist with strong opinions of her own, not simply all the correct ones. I recommending her Substack and whatever she releases into the wild, like this piece today on what the revival of Michael Jackson says about America.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Arizona Dreams’ and ‘Cactus Heart,’ by Jon Talton

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I’m still clawing my way out of my respiratory infection, and so have been reading in pretty long stretches, concentrating on Jon Talton’s interesting David Mapstone mysteries. I have to confess I don’t love the books as much as I did, but I haven’t ditched the author yet.

Arizona Dreams finds our hero, Arizona “sheriff’s historian” David Mapstone, getting a visit from a woman who claims to be a former student of his (though he doesn’t remember her) from his teaching days. She gives him a map that’s supposed to lead to the desert grave of a murder victim. But that’s not what he finds at all…

Meanwhile, David’s wife Lindsey, also a deputy, is investigating a series of ice pick murders. David will get involved with that investigation too.

Cactus Heart is prequel, set back before the turn of the millennium, before David and Lindsey got together. In hot pursuit of a couple of criminals, David and the sheriff stumble on an old crypt in an abandoned building. Inside the crypt are two small skeletons – the skeletons of children. David’s investigation will lead him to the old crimes of one of the county’s most powerful families.

The stories remain well-written and interesting. I am cooling to the author because, in spite of the anti-woke opinions David Mapstone expresses in regard to his academic career, some of his other views bother me. David describes himself as a Goldwater libertarian, but a Greenie in terms of land development (fair enough; the southwest is certainly overdeveloped). He’s also not interested in a strong border. In these books, anyone who believes in border enforcement is uniformly portrayed as a racist. These books, it should be noted, were written before the borders were completely opened during the Biden administration, and all the human suffering that caused. It looks kind of dumb in retrospect, to me at least.

Still, the books maintain my interest. Cautions for language and sex scenes, which sometimes seem to me a little more detailed than necessary.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Camelback Falls’ and ‘Dry Heat,’ by Jon Talton

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This will be a rare double review. I need to pick up my pace, as I’ve been running through Jon Talton’s David Mapstone series pretty quickly. It’s not that I don’t have other things to do than read, but I’m fighting a respiratory infection at the moment and I keep stopping for breaks. And when I take a break, I read. And when books are these good, the breaks tend to get long.

David Mapstone, if you recall yesterday’s review, is an unemployed academic historian, hired by his friend, chief deputy sheriff Mike Peralta, to investigate cold cases in Phoenix. When Camelback Falls opens, Mike has just been sworn in as the new sheriff – but a few minutes later he’s cut down by an assassin. As Mike fights for his life in the hospital, David finds himself – much against his will – appointed interim sheriff.

Soon David finds himself investigating another cold case – the murder of two deputies. Evidence he uncovers seems to suggest considerable corruption in the sheriff’s office – corruption that seems to involve Mike himself.

Moving on to the next book, that’s Dry Heat. This time out, David investigates the death of a homeless man whose case becomes more interesting when an FBI badge is found sewn into his jacket. The badge is that of the only FBI agent ever murdered in Arizona, a crime long unsolved. Meanwhile, David’s new wife Leslie, a digital forensic detective, has become the target of assassins, sent by a Russian gangster whose operation she helped close down.

The David Mapstone books are excellent in several ways. The prose is very good; the characters are vivid. The mysteries are genuinely intriguing. And the values generally please me (though David and Leslie cohabit before marriage).

I’m really enjoying these books.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Concrete Desert,’ by Jon Talton

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A search of our old posts shows that I reviewed a Jon Talton novel some time back, and liked it very much. But somehow he dropped off my radar.  Concrete Desert, the first book in his David Mapstone series, showed up cheap recently, so I bought and read it. Now I’m a fan.

David Mapstone is a native of Phoenix, Arizona. He was a policeman there in his youth, then he went away to earn his doctorate in History. But he found that there are few opportunities in academia nowadays (the early 2000s) for white males who don’t hate western civilization. He ended up back in Phoenix, where his old police mentor, Mike Peralta, is now chief deputy sheriff. Mike offers David a job as Sheriff’s Department historian, investigating old cold cases – not necessarily a permanent job, but something to do, and he’d carry a badge and a gun again. David accepts.

Almost immediately, he gets a visit from Julie, his old lover. She has a younger sister who has disappeared, and she wants David to look for her. David still has a weakness for Julie, and agrees. Meanwhile, on the job, he discovers a pattern in old cases of murders of young women. A serial killer had been at work, he realizes, and nobody noticed.

But there are people out there who want the past covered up. And there are others who are lying to David, and are ready to kill him and anyone else who gets in their way, if he can’t unmask them first.

I was highly impressed with Concrete Desert. The book had a strong sense of place; the descriptions of Phoenix and its environs were vivid and tactile. The prose was excellent (not as quotable as, say, Chandler or MacDonald, but most effective), and the dialogue and characters were lively. And to put the cherry on top, culturally conservative opinions popped out frequently.

Highly recommended. Cautions for language, violence, and adult situations.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Mask,’ by Dean Koontz

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Dean Koontz, always a prolific author, turned out several thrillers under pseudonyms early in his career. He wrote The Mask, published in 1981, under the name of Owen West. That’s not the very beginning of the author’s career, but the book struck me as rather underbaked Koontz.

Carol Tracy is a psychologist in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She gets the job of treating a teenaged girl known only as Jane Doe, who has shown up with total amnesia about her past. Jane is beautiful, well-mannered, and sweet. Somebody must miss her, because she’s a child any parent would cherish – Carol herself, who’s been trying vainly to conceive, begins to cherish her, and soon takes her into her home. But why has Carol begun to to have terrible nightmares? And why is her husband hearing unexplained thumping noises in their house?

There’s also Carol’s friend and mentor Grace, who starts receiving cryptic phone calls from the voice of her own deceased husband, warning her to keep Carol and the girl apart.

The book escalates, in typical Koontz fashion, to a violent, wrenching, and abrupt climax.

I was not greatly impressed by The Mask. It seemed to me a conventional supernatural thriller, lacking the deeper themes the author would later bring to his work.

It was okay, if you’re not too offended by reincarnation.