Courtesy of our friend, Dale Nelson, here’s a video of poet/priest Malcolm Guite (whose taste in clothing seems unnervingly similar to my own), reading some of C. S. Lewis’s poetry in Lewis’s very study, in his home — the Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford.
All posts by Lars Walker
See me in Brainerd!
If you’re anywhere around Brainerd Minnesota on Saturday, you have the awesome opportunity to see me at the Crow Wing Viking Festival, demonstrating the ancient Viking craft of selling paperback books. And, oh yes, there’ll be some other Vikings around, doing actual Viking stuff.
It’s held at the fairgrounds. You can learn all about it at the festival web site, linked above. We did it there last year too, and it was great fun. I recall we were all champing at the bit to go back in time again, after a long two long years of Plague and Penance.
This looks to be an interesting summer for me. I may be going as far as Montana next month, and I’m scheduled to participate in an alumni author’s forum at one of my several alma maters, in Iowa, for Homecoming. I’ll keep you informed.
I’ll have a post tomorrow, in spite of being out of town — if I can figure out how to set this contraption to “post later.”
If not, you’ll see the next post right away.
‘Those Who Remain,’ by Chris Culver
Good writing. Fully rounded characters. Love, pathos, and moral horror. Chris Culver’s Those Who Remain is a fascinating and disturbing book. I can’t say I loved it, because it left me troubled. But it’s darn good.
Homer Watson is a sheriff’s detective in St. Louis County, Missouri. He’s a family man, and happy in his life. But there are pressures. One of his small sons is autistic, and doing poorly in school. He and his wife would love to put the boy in a special school, but their salaries just won’t stretch that far.
One day he’s called to the site of a possible suicide. He recognizes the victim. It’s Hailey Bowman, a young woman who killed a policeman a year ago. She claimed he’d tried to rape her and was found not guilty. There are a lot of cops who’d have liked to see her dead.
But Homer’s a straight arrow. When the death proves to be murder, he looks to his fellow cops for suspects. That doesn’t pan out, but he gets a tip that Hailey has been living as the kept girlfriend of her defense lawyer, a man Homer has personal reasons to despise.
And when Homer gets an offer of a good-paying job from someone he cleared as a suspect, and he accepts it for his son’s sake, all his colleagues suspect the worst about him.
But the reader knows from the very beginning that Homer’s on the wrong track. The person really responsible is Pilar Garcia, a loving grandmother. Pilar runs an ostensibly legitimate cleaning business, but her main work force is composed of illegal aliens. She brings these people in and pays them below minimum wage to maximize profits. On the other hand, she makes sure they’re well fed, healthy, and housed, and helps them get established once their indentures are over. She is full of good will, and cares about her family above all things. She cares so much for her family that she’s willing to kill innocent outsiders to protect them – or to keep them in line.
Pilar is a masterfully painted portrait of how even a human’s best natural instincts can lead to appalling evil. I don’t know what the author intended, but one can’t help thinking of the doctrine of Original Sin.
Those Who Remain was well-written, compelling, and horrifying. I’m not sure I’m brave enough to read the next Homer Watson book. But I can recommend this one highly.
‘Hunting Rabbits, by Mark Gilleo
Here in the Midwest (which is actually the North Central US, but why be pedantic?), when we encounter something that’s unlike anything we’ve seen before, but still doesn’t impress us much, we damn it with faint praise by saying, “Well, that’s different.”
I’d describe Mark Gilleo’s Hunting Rabbits as “different.” I can honestly say I haven’t ever read anything quite like it before.
Charlie Gates is chief of police in Williamsburg, Virginia, home of Colonial Williamsburg. One day there’s a holdup at a local drug store, and the culprit is thwarted, getting his arm broken by a bystander who knows how to handle himself. The bystander then disappears.
The next part of the story confused me a little. Williamsburg isn’t a big town, as far as I know. But the police resources that are now devoted to this non-lethal crime struck me as implausible in any police department these days. Charlie is even able to secure the assistance of a big-city homicide detective, Luis “Quags” Millares, who becomes his trusty right-hand man.
Studying surveillance camera footage, they learn that the crime-stopping bystander soon left the area on a bus, along with a couple other drug store customers. A little inquiry reveals that this bus is one of a private fleet whose sole purpose is to transport CIA trainees to and from “The Farm,” the nearby, high-security federal training facility.
Even more intriguing, a fingerprint on the robber’s gun, touched by the crime-stopper, matches a print from the scene of an old murder – that of Charlie’s own sister, one of the victims of a still-unidentified serial killer decades ago.
What confronts them then is what I’d describe as a “black box” investigation. Because of security regulations, the cops find themselves unable to interrogate either their suspect or any witnesses. What they end up doing is to present various threats of bad publicity to the Farm authorities, and then watch as they themselves clean up their own mess — not always getting it right, either.
I found the story unsatisfactory in several ways. The decisive stuff in the narrative happens mostly offstage. Our heroes are just spectators, sometimes unsatisfied spectators.
Also I thought the characterization was clumsy, especially at the beginning, where characters commit the common literary sin of telling people too much at their first meetings. And there were some homophone spelling problems.
The book wasn’t bad, but it didn’t leave me wanting more.
There’ll never be another Judith Durham…
There’s much talk today of the death of Olivia Newton-John, the famous Australian singer. And that’s appropriate. She was a great talent (not to mention a heartthrob for my generation).
But I just learned of the death, last Friday, of another great Australian singer. Judith Durham of the Seekers succumbed to a long-standing lung condition. She was 79.
According to what I’ve read, Miss Durham was a Christian who hesitated at first to go into secular music because she was committed to Gospel.
The Seekers’ music was unique. I hope it lasts forever, because it sure means a lot to this old man.
Rest in peace.
‘Dark Peak,’ by Adam J. Wright
A good psychological thriller can be great entertainment, if the psychology is plausible. How does Dark Peak, by Adam J. Wright, stack up?
Mitch Walker is an English landscaper, a hard-working divorced father. Thirty years ago, his sister was abducted and murdered by a serial killer in Derbyshire, where his family lived at the time. His mother was so traumatized that she took him and fled away, and he never had contact with his father again.
Now he receives notice that his father has died, leaving him the Gothic-style mansion where they lived at the time, plus a fortune. Mitch doesn’t mind the money, but he doesn’t look forward to going back to the mansion. He still has nightmares about the place.
Elly Cooper is also divorced. She’s a former journalist who wrote a bestselling book about a serial killer and has been living off the royalties for some time. But book sales have fallen off, and her agent offers her a deal to do a new book, about a series of unsolved murders in Derbyshire, one of which is the murder of Mitch’s sister.
They will arrive around the same time, and their arrival will stir up old memories and old evil. It soon becomes apparent that the murders have not stopped – and someone in Mitch’s own family may be responsible.
The great weakness in Dark Peak was characterization – which ought to be the first thing you need to get right in a book of this type. If you don’t understand your own characters, how are we to believe you about psychopaths? The characters in Dark Peak commit the common fictional character error of keeping secrets from the police for reasons that advance the plot but seem unnatural in the real world. They also tell each other too much – real people rarely spill their guts to each other like these people do. It provides an excuse for information dumps, but again it rings hollow.
Also, for this reader, the murderer’s motivation, when finally revealed, didn’t seem very plausible.
The book is free for Kindle as of this review, so you might want to check it out, but I was rather disappointed. Cautions for disturbing content.
‘Twisted Justice,’ by Dennis Carstens
I liked the first Marc Kadella novel that I read, Cult Justice (by Dennis Carstens), even though there were some problems with the prose, because it had solidly conservative content and the story was pretty good. Reminiscent of a John Sandford book, but with a legal setting. The second one, Maddy’s Justice, I liked less, because it was all You-Go-Girl feminism (as I perceived it). So I figured I’d give Kadella one more shot with Twisted Justice. I have to say, he knocked it out of the park. For this reader.
Minneapolis lawyer Marc Kadella, along with his impossibly hot girlfriend, Maddy Rivers, attends a Christmas season party in a box at U.S. Bank Stadium. They were invited by Parker Crane, a friend who’s done well in financial services. During the party, Parker asks Marc about what a divorce would cost him, as his marriage is on the rocks. When he hears the answer, Parker comments that he’d be better off killing her. Then he takes it back.
Not long after, Parker’s wife Diana is stabbed to death in the parking garage of her lover’s apartment building. When the police check Parker’s cell phone records, they put him in that exact spot at the time of the murder.
Parker maintains that his phone was stolen, and he’s being framed. He retains Marc to defend him. As a defense attorney, Marc, of course, has no need to prove Parker innocent. He just needs to raise reasonable doubt. His obvious tactic is to construct a SODDI (Some Other Dude Did It) defense.
To do this, he looks into Diana’s personal history – and finds a wealth of alternative murderers. Because it turns out Diana, a former Minnesota Vikings cheerleader, had a nice little side gig going as a high-end call girl. And some of her clients were among the most powerful men in Minnesota, men with plenty of things to hide…
This book was a little more courtroom-centric than the previous book, with fewer shootouts and gunfights. That was fine with me. The courtroom scenes seemed authentic, and thus educational. As usual with this series, I found the character banter amusing, but not convincing. The problem with misplaced modifiers in the text, so evident in Cult Justice, was not noticeable here. I did note one badly cast sentence that should have been re-written, but in general the writing was okay. The final “surprise twist” didn’t surprise me, but was dramatically appropriate.
What I really loved about Twisted Justice was that it poked a well-deserved finger in the eye of the Minnesota power structure. That was genuinely sweet.
Viking festival film, featuring me
I found this film on YouTube. It’s some footage of the Viking festival at Avaldsnes, which I attended last month. This would be Saturday. I see several people I met on it, But I think everyone will agree that the highlight of the film is the scene, toward the end, where I am featured tending the fire in the longhouse. Enjoy.
Happy endings, tragedy, and futility
Occasionally, I think. Even more occasionally, what I think makes sense.
Today I was thinking about stories. Or “story” as a subject. I’ve written about it here before.
I have a theological view of stories. I noticed first, long ago, that the basic structure of plot (hero faces challenge – hero must overcome repeated, escalating failures to achieve goal) works because it mirrors the basic structure of our lives. This is the art of living. Stories tell us how to live. (A bad story is a kind of crime, because it teaches wrong lessons that could get people hurt.)
Later, I thought larger. The universe, it seems to me, is a story. Christians don’t believe that life is an eternal cycle, as many of the pagans did. We believe that history is a narrative. It has a beginning and an end. Tolkien declared that the Resurrection was the “eucatastrophe” (the happy, unexpected turn of events) of the story. The final happy ending awaits.
I had the thought, this morning, that all stories with happy endings are, in some sense, Christian. Even if they’re profane and filthy. They still have a holy structure. Sacred bones, you might say.
But then I thought, what about tragedy? Is tragedy un-Christian?
No. Tragedy is (according to Aristotle) meaningful. The hero’s ending may be awful, but it means something. The tragic hero may deserve his fate (like Macbeth) or may be the innocent victim of Destiny (like Oedipus). But his death is significant. It arouses pity and horror. It enriches the spirit. There’s meaning in tragedy.
What is not Christian is the story of futility. The absurdist tale. I’ve run across a few in my time, and I hate them. One that comes to mind is “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” which I watched on Netflix. I can see the story’s value as a corrective to the conventions and tropes of the Western genre, which get turned on their heads one after another. But the final conclusion is emptiness. Another was “No Country for Old Men,” also by the Coen Brothers. I’ve heard it described as a Christian story – and maybe it is at some intellectual level too deep for me – but I saw it as a story bereft of hope.
I’m trying to work these thoughts into the book. Means a few last-minute adjustments.
‘Bright Orange for the Shroud,’ by John D. MacDonald
After the minimum waiting time, they were married late one afternoon at the court house, and left in a new white Pontiac convertible, the back seat stacked with her matched luggage, her smile as brilliant as a brand new vermin trap ordered from Herter’s catalogue.
Whenever I see a deal on one of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books in e-book form, I grab it. So it was with Bright Orange for the Shroud, a fairly early – but memorable – entry in the series. If I remember correctly, now and then in later books, when he’s recalling his personal nightmares, McGee mentions Boo Waxwell.
Travis McGee isn’t a private eye. He calls himself a salvage specialist. When people are robbed of large amounts of money or valuable possessions, he goes and gets them back, then keeps half the value. This enables him to live his chosen lifestyle – “taking his retirement in installments.”
He plans to make this particular summer one of his lazy ones. He’ll do some maintenance on his big houseboat, the Busted Flush, cruise a bit, do some fishing. He’s earned a rest.
Until Arthur Wilkinson shows up on the dock, incoherent and emaciated. Arthur was part of their beachside community for a while, a low-key, diffident man who’d made money in the family business. Then he met tiny, gorgeous Wilma Ferrer, married her, and moved away.
But it turned out Wilma was a con woman. With her little group of confidence friends, she picked Arthur clean. Money wasn’t enough for her, though. Together with the muscle of the group, big Boo Maxwell, she made sure Arthur had been destroyed as a man.
McGee can help people recover stuff, but recovering a lost soul is outside his skill set. So he goes to Chookie McCall, a professional dancer who dated Arthur for a while, before hooking up with a wrong guy, now in prison. Though she’s reluctant at first, one look at Arthur arouses all Chookie’s maternal instincts.
McGee comes up with a plan to con the cons and get some of Arthur’s money back. It’s a good plan. His mistake is underestimating Boo Waxwell as an opponent. Though he comes off as an ignorant, overgrown cracker, Boo is no fool at all. Someone suggests that Boo is McGee’s alter ego, what he might have been if something had been missing in his make-up. (In many ways, Boo anticipates Max Cady, the brutal villain of MacDonald’s novel The Executioners, which was filmed twice under the title, Cape Fear.)
There’s not a wasted line in this book. It’s tough and hard-boiled and tender and sympathetic. There’s a lot of sexual content. Some of it reads really great from my traditional, sexist point of view, and some of it reflects the mores of the sexual revolution and hasn’t aged well.
The plot includes, in my opinion, one too many lucky breaks for the good guys. But all in all, Bright Orange for the Shroud works splendidly. Highly recommended.