All posts by Lars Walker

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Daughters of Cain,’ by Colin Dexter

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Morse had got it wrong, of course. Morse nearly always got things hopelessly, ridiculously wrong at the start of every case. But he always seemed to have thoughts that no one was capable of thinking. Like now.

I think I’ve read all Colin Dexter’ Inspector Morse novels already. But one of them showed up cheap for Kindle purchase, and I figured I’d re-read it – especially as I’ve been watching episodes of the old John Thaw BBC TV series recently. The book was The Daughters of Cain, and I recognized it as one that – though I enjoyed it – I thought included one ridiculous plot element.

Morse is put in charge of a case concerning an Oxford don who’s been murdered in his home. The chief suspect is the “scout” (the servant) in the college building where he worked. That scout had been found to be dealing drugs to students. He also (we learn) had been brutalizing his wife.

But that man has disappeared. Soon Morse begins to suspect that he too has been killed, by a conspiracy of nice women – his abused wife, her teacher friend, and his stepdaughter (also abused), who is now a prostitute.

As is customary in the Morse novels, we have no moments of Sherlock Holmes super-ratiocination here. Morse, fighting a bad cold and fueled by beer and cigarettes, makes one wrong guess after another, until by a process of elimination (and inspiration) he hits on the truth. Which is pretty much how it works in real life, which may explain the charm of the series.

What is harder to explain is the charm of Morse himself. I have an idea that author Dexter’s original conception of Morse was not much like the actor John Thaw (Shaun Evans of “Endeavour” may have been closer). As I recall, the first Morse novel features women commenting on how “dishy” the detective is.

But as the series continued, Dexter threw in with the TV show entirely, and his Morse and the video Morse became pretty much the same. Yet Morse seemed to possess the same attractiveness to women.

In The Daughters of Cain, one of the central characters is Ellie, the abused stepdaughter of the missing murderer, who is now a prostitute. Although Morse finds her repellant at first, he finds himself increasingly attracted to her. And then – and this is what I really don’t get – she reciprocates the feeling.

Why? What is there about Morse as we know him that would appeal to a young woman who has romantic options? He’s much older, he’s out of shape, he’s short-tempered, he isn’t rich.

This element of the story simply made no sense to me. (Not to mention that most cops have more sense than to fall for prostitutes.) It seemed to me as if the author was forcing his characters into unnatural behaviors, and that’s a major sin in fiction.

Otherwise, The Daughters of Cain was quite a good novel. You might feel differently about the romantic element.

Cautions for language and mature subject matter.

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A day with the Samband

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I’m late posting tonight, because I got in late, and anyway it felt like a Saturday  to me. I was doing a Saturday thing, in my subjective world.

I think I’ve mentioned that I’m now editing the magazine of the Valdres Samband, one of many US organizations composed of descendants of immigrants from various regions of Norway (I’m not a Valdres descendant myself, which will tell you how desperate they were for an editor). Today, in that capacity, I attended their annual Stevne, which means their annual get-together, in Minneapolis. I also delivered my world-renowned lecture on Viking Legacy, and sold some books.

The video above does not represent what we were actually doing today. There was no dancing, though I’m sure it would have been welcome. But we did have a fiddler entertaining us during dinner on a Hardanger Fiddle, the instrument being played in the video, which (appropriately) was actually posted by the Valdres Samband several years back.

If the tones of the Hardanger Fiddle sound vaguely familiar, that may be because (at least according to what I was told) one was used for the theme music of the Riders of Rohan in the Lord of the Rings movies.

The Hardanger Fiddle is a uniquely Norwegian instrument. Below the usual four strings, it is strung with four or five more. These lower strings are not played directly, but resonate harmonically with the main notes, producing a weird, haunting droning sound sometimes compared to the bagpipes.

My Haugean pietist ancestors, by the way, would have been shocked by this, and might have smashed the fiddle if they could get their hands on it. They believed that dancing was bad in itself, but that Hardanger Fiddle music was positively demonic. Master fiddlers were regarded as a kind of wizard.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Till We Have Faces,’ by C. S. Lewis

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…the Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is. We call it the wrath of the gods; as if the great cataract in Phars were angry with every fly it sweeps down in its green thunder.

I wonder what J. R. R. Tolkien thought of Till We Have Faces. I can’t seem to find any information about that online. Tollers and Jack were, of course, somewhat estranged by the time this novel was published; not turned enemies, but their friendship had cooled through the circumstances of life. I have an idea Tolkien thought Lewis had lost interest in their mythopoeic project, their shared endeavor to write new myths foreshadowing the gospel for modern pagans.

But that’s very much what Till We Have Faces is – though the myth isn’t a new one (Tolkien specifically wanted English myths) but a retelling of a classic Greek one, the myth of Cupid and Psyche. The central mythopoeic idea that myths are “good dreams” that anticipate the gospel is here, richly and beautifully realized.

Orual is a princess in a fictional barbarian kingdom, apparently sometime in the early Iron Age. She is the oldest – and ugliest – of three sisters. Redival is pretty and frivolous. Istra, the youngest, is so beautiful and sweet that people treat her like a goddess. “The Fox,” the girls’ Greek slave tutor, calls her Psyche, and Orual dotes on her.

But when famine and pestilence come to the land, the people turn on Psyche, accusing her of blaspheming the gods, causing all this evil. It is determined by the priests that she must be taken to the Mountain and sacrificed to the Beast who dwells there. Orual is injured trying to defend her sister, and so is unconscious when the ceremony is carried out.

Later, Orual travels with the chief of the king’s guard up to the Mountain, to gather her sister’s bones for burial. To her astonishment and joy, she finds Psyche there, alive and well. But the girl tells her a crazy story about being married to the Beast of the Mountain, who is actually a sublime god. Orual, certain that Psyche has gone insane, conceives a plan to bring her to her senses. And great evil will come from this.

I first read Till We Have Faces a lifetime ago, when I was in high school and the book was fairly new. It was the second Lewis book I read, after The Screwtape Letters. Callow as I was, I recognized it for a book full of depths, but I couldn’t see very far into them.

Reading it now, as an old man, I found much more in the story. It moved me deeply. Has any book ever dissected the human heart as this one does, bringing to light all the petty possessiveness, jealousy, and even hatred that we humans often mean by what we call love?

Great book. Read it if you haven’t yet. If you have read it, read it again.

Reviews, Writing

In which I plumb new depths of hypocrisy

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How desperate am I for work, you ask? How low would I stoop for money?

Would I sell a kidney? Flog condo time shares in Florida? Peddle my body on street corners?

Ha! Kids stuff.

I’ve been reduced to watching the History Channel Vikings series.

Yes, in spite of all my railings and denunciations against the thing, I’m watching the first season through now. I think I’ll need to watch more seasons, and I think the most economical way to do that will be to revive the Netflix subscription I dropped. As a business expense, though I don’t think I can deduct it.

Here’s how coming to this pass, uh… came to pass:

I have a friend who works with a web magazine that actually pays non-trivial money. I suggested to him an article I might write for it, one having to do with Vikings.

He countered that he’d like to see my topic related to the Vikings series.

I seem to recall I dickered my fee up a little at that point. Then I agreed to take the thing on. So I now have to watch enough of the series to enable me to speak with some authority.

I mentioned my plight on Facebook. Some friends suggested I might find I enjoy it.

This has not come to pass, so far.

What do I dislike about the Vikings series?

First of all – and I’ve written about this before – they get Norse society completely wrong. The Vikings in this production live in an autocracy, where the chieftain (the “earl”) calls the shots. He claims all the booty from raids. He kills people without consequence.

Sigh. Read Viking Legacy, for pete’s sake. The Norse had a grassroots democracy. Leaders were obligated to submit to election, and could be booted out if they got too big for said boots.

Armor and costumes – perhaps we reenactors overdid it, making “Vikings did not wear horns on their helmets!” our battle cry for so many years. The props people at the studio answered, “Got it! The Vikings didn’t wear any armor at all!” And that idea came to rule all their decisions, stuck fast in their consciousness like an axe in an unhelmeted skull.

There are plenty of fights here, and as far as I can see they’re entirely chaotic. Aside from the lack of armor, neither logistics, troop numbers, nor tactics matter at all. Victory is bestowed by the favor of the scriptwriting gods. Ragnar Lothbrok and his men (by the time of episode six, which is as far as I’ve gotten now) seem to be about to conquer the English kingdom of Northumbria with three ships’ crews).

I could go on and on. I’ll just mention one more thing. Clunkiness.

I’ve often said that one thing I’ve tried to avoid in my novels – and I hope I’ve avoided somewhat it through using Father Ailill as a bridge character – is clunkiness. Old time heroes, clunking around in funny costumes and heavy boots, ranting about honor and the old gods, in awkward sentence constructions. Making little psychological sense to modern readers/viewers.

I have an idea (bear in mind that I’m often mistaken) that Vikings will not age well. It seems clunky to me. When the haircuts stop looking cool, our grandchildren will laugh at it.

But I carry on with my “research.” If I’m going to sell my soul, I mean to give value for money.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Buried Caesars,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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There are still a few of the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Toby Peters novels left that I haven’t read. But now I’ve read Buried Caesars, in which Toby meets Douglas MacArthur and Dashiell Hammett.

The Toby Peters novels, in case you’re not familiar with them, are set in Hollywood in the 1930s and ʼ40s. They are semi-comic in spirit, finding our private eye hero taking jobs for one famous figure or another (usually, but not always, movie stars), though he never achieves financial success, continuing to live in a shabby boarding house and sharing his office with a low-rent (and low-hygiene) dentist.

It’s 1942, and Toby is summoned to a large estate, where he meets a man who isn’t supposed to be in this hemisphere. General Douglas MacArthur is supposed to be in the Philippines, but he’s come home in secret to deal with a personal crisis. Certain of American victory, he has – he explains – made some plans for running for president after the war. He prepared some strategy papers for his campaign which would be highly embarrassing if they were made public at the present time. And now one of his aides has stolen the papers and is in California offering them to the highest bidder. MacArthur wants Toby to investigate because he’s a) known to be discreet, and b) almost unknown otherwise.

Toby promises to turn all his resources to the task. His problem is that his resources are in fact very limited. However, he is surprised to find a famous man in the dental chair of his office-mate – the author Dashiell Hammett. Hammett explains that he’s trying to enlist for the war (in spite of his age), and the army tells him he has to get his teeth fixed. He’s (temporarily) off the bottle, he has a couple days free, and he’s curious to see whether he still retains some of his old skills as a Pinkerton detective. So he and Toby set out together.

Clues lead them to a castle in the desert, where a crazy millionaire is plotting a military coup, but he’s not the only suspect. Toby will also pick up a stray cat and a framed photo of Wallace Beery in a woman’s wig.

Buried Caesars is undemanding entertainment. I always resent Dashiell Hammett in real life (as opposed to his novels, which I love) because of his unrepentant Communism, but as usual, author Kaminsky steers clear of the most controversial stuff.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Deep Blue Good-bye,’ by John D. MacDonald

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I am tall, and I gangle. I look like a loose-jointed, clumsy hundred and eighty. The man who takes a better look at the size of my wrists can make a more accurate guess. When I get up to two twelve I get nervous and hack it back on down to two oh five. As far as clumsiness and reflexes go, I have never had to use a flyswatter in my life. My combat expression is one of apologetic anxiety. I like them confident. My stance is mostly composed of elbows.

Another deal on a Travis McGee book by John D. MacDonald – and this is another important entry in the series, if only by virtue of its being the first.

I’ve told the story here before, because it amuses me. So I’ll just summarize it now. In 1963, Fawcett Publications, a major popular paperback house, hired a new author to create a detective series, replacing Richard S. Prather, their former top seller, who’d followed deeper pockets to greener pastures (to mix a metaphor). John D. MacDonald, the new kid, came up with a slightly reclusive hero, a beach bum living on a houseboat, called Dallas McGee (changed quickly to Travis McGee after the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, Texas). McGee called himself a “salvage expert,” but he didn’t salvage shipwrecks or cars. He recovered stolen objects or money, in return for half the value as a finder’s fee. The first book to appear, in 1964, was The Deep Blue Good-bye. (Every volume would incorporate a color in the title.)

McGee is persuaded by a friend, a dancer, to talk to another dancer named Cathy Kerr. Cathy is a country girl, a single mother, living hand to mouth. But she thinks she might have a right to a missing treasure. Her father, she explains, came home from the war with some secret package that he hid carefully, before being sent to prison for murder. He died before his release, but after a while his former cellmate Junior Allen showed up – a big, strong, dynamic type who swept Cathy off her feet and soon had her completely dominated. He also dug holes all over their farm. And one day he found something and vanished. Cathy is pretty sure he found her father’s stash, and she and her kid could sure use half of it, if McGee could get it back for her.

McGee doesn’t need work just now, but he’s impressed with Cathy’s dignity after all she’s been through. He traces Junior Allen’s footsteps, learning he was last seen on a yacht with a rich, beautiful woman. McGee finds the woman, Lois Atkinson, in her home, cast off by Allen and now a wreck of herself. Allen systematically broke her down and degraded her, and she has nearly starved herself to death in despair and self-disgust. McGee nurses her back to health, and at last begins a gentle affair with her, one which threatens to break through his prickly personal defenses.

But he still has Junior Allen to catch, and he formulates a devious plan to con the con man.

Unfortunately, as with all plans of battle, this one does not survive contact with the enemy. And Junior Allen is a formidable enemy indeed. The climax is one of the most harrowing and memorable in the series.

I read a review some time back that argued that The Deep Blue Good-bye is unworthy of the rest of the books, weighed down by the standard tropes of 1960s men’s fiction. I cannot agree. MacDonald certainly serves up the expected necessaries – plenty of violence and sex. But I think the original readers back in 1964 must have been puzzled by this book – there’s a lot of genuinely excellent prose here, and even the obligatory sex scenes are lyrical and revelatory of character, rather than sordid. (Though I do not approve of the sexual mores.)

Some of MacDonald’s prose – I would argue – is as good as that of his contemporaries Hemingway and O’Hara, only ensconced in far more interesting stories.

I drove back through late afternoon heat. The world darkened, turned to a poisonous green, and somebody pulled the chain. Water roared down the chute. Rose-colored lightning webbed down. Water bounced knee high, silver in the green premature dusk, and I found a place to pull off out of the way and let the fools gnash each other’s chrome and tinwork, fattening the body shops, busying the adjustors, clogging the circuit court calendars. The sign of the times is the imaginary whiplash injury.

Another notable element in this book was one moment – never to be repeated again that I can recall – when McGee hints at some trauma in his earlier life that left him perpetually commitment-averse.

To draw a line under it all, I highly enjoyed The Deep Blue Good-bye and recommend it. Not for kids.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Peace River Village,’ by Christopher Amato

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In our diversity-loving modern world, nothing is more popular than various kinds of fusion (perhaps because lots of fusion ultimately leads back to uniformity). Sometimes fusion can work very well, as when, oh, for example, an author blends historical fiction with adventure fantasy.

Other fusions work less happily, or at least it looks that way to me based on reading the fusion of Cozy Mystery with Thriller that is Christopher Amato’s Peace River Village.

The eponymous PRV is a retirement community in Sunland, Florida – which I take to be a fictional town (at least I never heard of it when I lived in the state). In a quiet, pleasant cul de sac, several former police officers have settled down for their golden years, purely by coincidence. There’s a vigorous widow who used to be a captain in Gary, Indiana, and two old cops from Chicago and DC who’ve settled into curmudgeonly routine and torpor. And another cop has just moved in across the circle.

One non-cop is a widow named Cora, whose great concerns are her daughter and granddaughter. The daughter is a degenerating drug addict living in a fetid apartment, but she still has hope for the granddaughter, Jennifer. Jennifer is a good, pretty girl who aspires to go to college. She is close to her grandmother, and spends a lot of time with her.

So when Jennifer doesn’t show up for a promised weekend, and Cora can’t reach her on her cell phone, Cora consults her neighbors, then calls the police. But the police dismiss the girl’s disappearance as a runaway case, and the neighbors start making inquiries on their own. What they uncover will lead to corruption, drugs, and human trafficking.

I’ll say this for Peace River Village – it interested me enough to keep me reading to the end, just because I was concerned about what happened to the girl. But I found the book very slow. The labored jollity of the retired cops’ jokes and the general low energy of their lives didn’t harmonize well with the serious nature of the crime and the victim’s peril. Things got moving toward the end, though, timed just right to permit a nick-of-time rescue.

The writing was labored and overdone – it could have used a lot of verbiage-trimming. The book had the flavor of Christian fiction (though I don’t think it is one of those), except for quite a lot of profanity.

I didn’t like Peace River Village a lot. Your mileage, as always, may vary.

Writing

A confusion of options

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A traditional Norwegian chest. Photo: Anne-Lise Reinsfelt, Norsk Folkemuseum. Creative Commons attribution Share-alike 3.0.

I wrote the other night about the glories of the English language, from the perspective of the creative writer. English offers lots of word choice options. Which can be overwhelming. I remember reading somewhere, long ago, about the odd psychological fact that if you’re looking for something to read – in an airport bookshop, for instance – it’s easier to select a book from a single revolving wire rack of paperbacks than from a wide array of shelves-full of books. In the second instance, the very quantity of your options paralyzes. You find something that might be interesting, but you can’t be sure there isn’t something better further along. You dawdle, paralyzed by the sheer magnitude of your options. With the small wire rack, you can quickly grasp the range of your choices, and grab up the best of what might be a mediocre lot.

New speakers of English face a similar problem, I imagine. They often have several choices (counting various word combinations) when looking for what the French call “le mot juste,” the precise, correct word.

In a Norwegian-related Facebook group the other day, a poster from Norway posted a picture of a chest they’d inherited. They described it, in all innocence, as a “coffin.” I don’t think anyone actually made fun of them for the word choice – in Norwegian, the word “kiste” serves for both ordinary storage chests and coffins. I suppose there are conceptual consequences – in Norway you put things away in chests, and you yourself are put away in a chest when you die. There’s a sense that they pack you up and put you in storage, like an artifact.

Not that Norwegian doesn’t have some challenging word options of its own. Long ago, I was corrected about the word for physical exercise. As I recall, I used “eksersis,” a natural guess for an English speaker. But “eksersis” refers to a drill, as in the military. What we call exercise they call “trening,” which is probably, I assume, a borrowing from English, but with the meaning slightly altered for local requirements.

The Norwegian who called a chest a coffin probably translated with artificial intelligence (I imagine). We hates AI around here, we does, for just such reasons. AI, though, is adequate for quick and dirty jobs (sadly, my lamented late side gig translating film scripts qualified as quick and dirty – not that I did it that way. But the quality I was able to offer in my work couldn’t compete, because quick and dirty is also cheap).

Ah well, the world of translation had its chance at my services, and they cast me out. Instead, I will soon release The Baldur Game to inevitable universal acclaim, becoming rich and famous in my declining years.

After which I’ll be packed away in a kiste.

That’s kind of morbid, isn’t it? Sorry. I had to tie the thread up somehow. Tying up plot threads with a death is one of the cheapest go-to tricks in the fiction writer’s bag. Or chest.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead Man Switch,’ by Matthew Quirk

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I think I may have to give up reading thrillers. The older I get, the more tender-hearted I seem to grow, and the harder it is to read about people in peril. Meanwhile, as I get older, the thriller writers get better and better at their job. Matthew Quirk’s Dead Man Switch was excellently written, and I thought it might kill me.

This is the second volume in a series starring a hero named John Hayes. Hayes previously worked for yet another (the recurrence of this theme in literature surely must indicate some public hunger) super-secret, deniable military unit tasked with assassinating the very worst terrorists in the world. The operation, called Cold Harvest, does not officially exist, and all its operatives know that if they’re caught they’ll be liable to capital punishment. But they also know the thing has to be done.

Hayes has retired, withdrawn to a secret location with his wife and stepdaughter. For strategic reasons he has agreed to be officially listed as a fugitive. In the eyes of the world he’s a traitor and a hunted man.

But he gets called back to Washington. Several members of the Cold Harvest unit have recently died in accidents. The accidents have been meticulously orchestrated, but they’re not coincidental. Someone is trying to wipe out the unit members.

But that, as it turns out, is the least of it. The real plan is much bigger than that, and diabolically organized by a master criminal choreographer.

Good plotting is a fine thing, and Dead Man Switch is marvelously plotted. But what impressed me even more was that the characters were extremely well drawn and psychologically complex. I cared about them – which made reading about their sufferings all the more difficult.

Author Quirk also has a knack for elevating suspense through withholding information from readers, only to spring it on them at the strategic moment. He writes very short chapters, which makes the story seem to move faster.

Dead Man Switch is a masterfully written novel, superior in style, in plotting, and in characterization. If you relish action, I’m sure you’ll like it. I’m not sure I could handle another.

Authors, Reading, Writing

Borges on the magic of English

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I need to read some Jorge Luis Borges. Pretty much all I know of him, I like. But I’ve only read one or two of his stories, and those in school. Pure laziness on my part – or a fear of finding myself out of my intellectual depth.

Anyway, this Argentine author has astonishing things to say about the English language in this little clip. He expresses an idea I first encountered years ago in Writer’s Digest magazine. It was in an article also written by a writer who used English as a second language. People learning English often – and very understandably – complain about the size of the vocabulary you need to learn. Which is fair enough. But, this author pointed out, once you’ve mastered it you’ve got an unparalleled instrument in your hands, like a huge organ with a hundred stops. You can get an infinity of subtle effects out of it.

Borges notes here that most every word in English has a light or a dark version, depending on whether you choose the Latin or the Germanic option. He also talks about combinations of verbs and prepositions, which I hadn’t been aware of before.

In my Erling books, I’ve tried to employ Germanic words as much as I could, for two reasons. First, when I was learning to write (I took a sort of correspondence course and studied Writer’s Digest religiously), I was instructed to generally choose the Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) word. Anglo-Saxon words, they said, are punchier, stronger. They make your writing more vivid and active.

I took that advice, and still believe in it (though I’m sure there’s an element of cultural bias involved. In the 18th Century, writers aspired to sound Classical, and always opted for the Latin word). But I had a further reason for going Anglo-Saxon. I was writing about Vikings, and I wanted to evoke a northern, Germanic mood. I like to think my diction contributes to a sense of place and time.

How do I master this vast English vocabulary, you ask? Read. Read a lot. Read above your comprehension level (authors like Borges, for instance). If you read on Kindle, they’ve got a neat feature where you can highlight a word right on the page and get a definition as if by sorcery.