All posts by Lars Walker

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Please don’t Include me, thank you very much

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So I took myself out for lunch yesterday. Went somewhere I hadn’t been in a while. It’s a diner called “The 50s Grill.” Not far from where I live. Excellent food and tremendous desserts. Kind of expensive for a diner, but really worth it.

They do the best hamburger I know of in town (no doubt I’ve missed some; don’t look to me as an authority). But I didn’t want a burger that day, so I got the meatloaf lunch. Very nice. And then they were advertising this Black Forest Cake with cherries in it, and I couldn’t resist that. My only complaint was that it was too large. (I skipped supper to make up for it.)

The waitress, an older later, was very nice. When I was done, as she was passing, she patted my shoulder and whispered, “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

I was, frankly, surprised. I hadn’t even been thinking about the holiday. I suddenly saw myself through her eyes. Old man, eating alone on Valentine’s Day, orders a fancy dessert. Probably a widower, reliving past happiness.

But no, really, that wasn’t my intention. I just wanted to eat out somewhere different. I had no intention of horning in on someone else’s holiday.

On Facebook, I saw a couple instances yesterday of single people trying to redefine the holiday to include them. Give it a new name. Make it Inclusive.

I’m frankly sick of the word “Inclusive.” When I happen to see a couple I know out on a date, I don’t sit down at the table with them, “including” myself in their night out. It belongs to them. If I want a date, I should get my own girlfriend. If I want a holiday, I should start one. Nobody’s stopping me. I’d be celebrating by myself, but that would kind of be the point, wouldn’t it?

One of P.G. Wodehouse’s great characters is Uncle Galahad Threepwood. Uncle Gally is the brother of Clarence, Earl of Emsworth, and shows up periodically in the Blandings Castle stories. It’s often said of him that it’s unfair that anyone should have had so much fun for so many years and still look so youthful and healthy. His chief function in the stories is to smooth the way for young couples whose parents are trying to keep them apart for one stuffy reason or another.

Occasionally Uncle Gally’s back story is mentioned. He once fell in love with a music hall performer, and his parents prevented their marriage. He has taken his revenge in the best way, by doing for others what no one was there to do for him.

As I’ve frequently mentioned, I don’t believe in the religion of True Love as understood in our culture (though The Princess Bride is great). But I think old single people ought to have Uncle Gally for a role model, rather than trying to Include Themselves in everybody else’s happiness.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dark Horse,’ by Gregg Hurwitz

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Aragón set the glass down, pushed it away. “Maturity is graduating from the belief that the world misunderstands you to the awareness that you misunderstand the world.” He laced his fingers together. “Who I have failed to become is the story of why my daughter suffers. That load of product I burned yesterday? I could have burned it, burned them all, two years ago or three. And then maybe she would be safe. I didn’t need you to tell me to do it. I didn’t need you. But clearly I did.”

The Orphan X series by Gregg Hurwitz is an amazing set of books that keeps getting better and better. I have a couple personal quibbles, but reading the latest, Dark Horse, was a delight overall.

As you may recall, Orphan X is Evan Smoak (also known as the Nowhere Man). A former super-secret government agent, he managed to get free and now operates as a freelance white knight, rescuing people in bad trouble. He lives in an expensive Los Angeles penthouse apartment. It’s a sterile, minimalist space where he finds comfort in his OCD.

That space was violated in the last novel, and now he’s in the process of rebuilding. But he’s interrupted by a plea for help from someone to whom he ordinarily wouldn’t give two seconds – a drug lord from the Texas border country.

Aragon Urrea tries to operate at a higher level than the cartels. He eschews terrorist tactics, contributes to the welfare of the people in his territory, and has always maintained his family’s home as an island of normal life. He has raised his daughter Anjelina to be a good person. But now she’s been kidnapped by a cartel, from her 18th birthday party.

Evan doesn’t like the idea of working for a drug dealer, but Anjelina is an innocent. He agrees to try to get her out, which involves infiltrating the cartel.

But that’s not Evan’s only problem. He’s having trouble relating to his teenaged ward, the female computer hacker Joey, who wants his permission to go on a solo road trip. Evan has no idea how to deal with adolescent rebellion, but he knows he doesn’t want her running around unprotected in this dangerous world.

And then there’s his almost-girlfriend Mia, who lives in the same building, and is facing a personal crisis beyond Evan’s power to help. Except that she wants him to give support to her son Peter. Another kid needing guidance from a guy who never experienced a real family.

Dark Horse is more than an action thriller. It’s about a damaged, obsessive-compulsive man forced (reluctantly) to engage with the world of human feelings and needs, far outside his comfort zone. He can put a bullet through a human heart with no trouble – but can he comfort a broken heart?

Author Hurwitz has been constantly raising the level of the Orphan X books. They’re becoming (in my opinion) something really wonderful and moving. I highly recommend them. Cautions for language and mayhem.

My only problem was that some PC elements were inserted where they really weren’t necessary. I hope the author gets over that.

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The Viking Ship Museum

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More video tonight. This is an amateur video, but pretty well done, of the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo. I’ve been there, of course, but I’ll probably never see it again. They closed it down recently for a five-year expansion. While they’re at it, they’re also working on stabilizing the old ships (I personally blame their deterioration on a guy I know, whose name I won’t divulge, who once put his hands on the Gokstad ship while the guards weren’t looking). By the time the renovation project is done, I’ll probably be too old to travel over there.

The one with the curly prow and stern is the Oseberg Ship, the oldest of the two. It seems to have been sort of a royal yacht, and two women were found buried in it. One assumes they’re a mistress and her slave, but they still haven’t worked out who’s who.

The one with the plain prow and stern is the Gokstad, which is larger and a genuine fighting ship. A tall man, wounded in the leg, was found buried in it. Among his grave goods was a peacock. That always amused me. A questionable tradition says its occupant was Olaf Gierstad-Elf, an ancestor of Saint Olaf, who plays a small role, as a ghost, in my novel-in-progress.

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The forgotten palace

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Nothing to review tonight. It’s a rich moment in my reading life – just enjoyed a new Dean Koontz (reviewed the other day), then I revisited Travis McGee (review yesterday) and now I’m on a new Greg Hurwitz Orphan X novel. Times to savor.

The video above is about the church/royal residence at Avaldsnes, on Karmøy island in Norway. I’ve talked about it often before. My great-grandfather was baptized in the church with the tower (though the tower wasn’t there at the time – it had to be restored in the 1920s). I have ancestors in that graveyard.

The first time I visited, in the 1990s, the relative who was showing Dad and me around told us they’d done some archaeological excavation south of the church, and discovered a secret tunnel. They were looking forward to further discoveries.

It wasn’t until 2017 that government funding made serious excavation possible. What the archaeologists discovered amazed them. An entire royal hall had once existed south of the church (as reconstructed in the video).

What amazes me is that we’re dealing with a forgotten palace here. How do you forget a palace? It’s easy to understand how a palace could fall down after a while. But I find it harder to comprehend it being forgotten entirely. Not only was it lost from the written record, but not so much as a legend survived.

Anyway, I think recreations like this are fun. Avaldsnes (under its old name, Augvaldsness) features heavily in the Erling book I’m writing, King of Rogaland. Also in the previous book, The Elder King, come to think of it. But that’s before the stone buildings existed.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper, by John D. MacDonald

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I rarely buy the e-book versions of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels. I just can’t justify paying the prices they ask for books I’ve already got in paperback. But now and then one shows up at a bargain price, and I always snap it up. So it was with The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper, one of the most memorable in the series – in a dark way. I got it during a brief sale.

Travis McGee, Florida beach bum, calls himself a “salvage specialist.” That means he recovers things that people have been robbed of, returns them to them, and keeps half the value. But he makes exceptions for friends, and the Pearsons are friends. Years ago he helped them with a boat deal, and then after the husband’s premature death he comforted the widow – in a carnal manner. They’ve kept in touch and he’s very fond of her and her two daughters.

At the start of this book, he comes back from a job to find a letter from the mother, Helena, telling him she’s dying of cancer. She’ll probably be gone by the time he reads this. She asks if he’d see if he can help her older daughter, Maureen, a beautiful woman married to a prosperous land developer. Maureen is suffering from a mysterious malady involving short-term memory loss, and has attempted suicide several times. McGee can’t imagine what he could do to help with a problem like that, but guilt (and the large check enclosed with the letter) motivate him to travel to their central Florida home and check things out.

Some things don’t add up. And then people start physically attacking McGee, which just gets him mad. There’s a lot of rot in this community, it turns out, and McGee is ready to kick it over to see what’s underneath. And – hopefully – save a life or two.

The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper is one of the darkest books in the series, and features one of its most shocking climaxes. There’s a lot of sex, but it’s described metaphorically, and quite beautifully. The rough language, as always, is consistent with the times, which means it’s cleaner than you’ll generally find in books written today. The book deals quite heavily with the race issue, in what seems to me fairly prophetic terms, though the scenes were a little awkward to my ear.

When I pick up a John D. MacDonald novel, I have a sense of plain, solid quality, like Shaker furniture. Nothing dazzling (though MacDonald can turn a fine phrase with the best of them), but every part is strong, and the whole thing is assembled with a craftsman’s eye. The books just work. Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Quicksilver,’ by Dean Koontz

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To create good fiction, you have to like people enough to want to write about the human condition—but close yourself alone in a room for a large part of your life to get the job done right. It’s as if a wrestler forsook the ring in favor of getting his own head in an armlock and slamming himself into walls for a few hours every day.

Dean Koontz’s umpteenth novel is Quicksilver. I wouldn’t put it on the highest tier of his works, but it’s quality, patented Koontz all the way through, and all the expected pleasures are present.

Quinn Quicksilver is a young man living in Phoenix. He is an orphan, found abandoned as a baby in a basket on a highway median and raised by loving nuns in an orphanage. Now he works as a writer for a small magazine, and is entirely unremarkable – except for a “strange magnetism” that sometimes draws him to locations where he finds valuable things.

So when, one day, he finds a couple of tough guys from a covert government agency sitting on either side of him in a diner, about to abduct him, he manages to escape out the back and successfully get away by car. Following his strange magnetism, he drives to an abandoned farm, where he’s just in time to rescue a kidnapped old man and his granddaughter – the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen. They’re grateful but not surprised by his arrival. They’ve been expecting him, they say. On top of that, they inform him that he’s going to marry the granddaughter. If they survive.

But first, they have a mission to complete. There’s a secret compound in the desert where a reclusive billionaire is running a sex cult. Joined by one further team member and a dog, they set their course to find the billionaire and rescue his victims.

Beautiful prose. Goofy humor. Action with a supernatural element. And the occasional moment of transcendence. That’s what we buy Koontz books for, and it’s all there in Quicksilver.

Also a lesson on theodicy and free will, at no extra charge.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Silent Blade,’ by Blake Banner

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I’ve been following, and enjoying, Blake Banner’s Harry Bauer series of action thrillers. The Silent Blade is the sixth in the series. It delivers all the action you could ask for, though it’s probably best not to think about it too much.

Harry Bauer is a covert operative for a shadowy private organization called Cobra. His particular passion is wiping out drug lords. In the last book he got rid of two at once, and now he’s on the run in Trinidad, cut off from his employers, trying to figure out a way to get back to New York without alerting either the law or the cartels.

Then he meets a beautiful woman who works for the CIA, who first helps him and then turns him over to her bosses for “enhanced interrogation.” They want to recruit him, they explain, but first they need to know who he’s been working for. He finally escapes from them and runs to the leader of a Colombian cartel, offering (he claims) to be their source inside the CIA when he goes to work for them. Here he meets another beautiful woman, and fireworks (of a couple kinds) follow.

The action is hot and heavy, the sex pretty much the same (though not too explicit). But I can’t resist noting that the plot doesn’t make a lot of sense. Harry has reached a stage where he seems to just jump into deadly situations without a plan for survival. Are we supposed to think he’s a master strategist, or does he just have a death wish? I have a suspicion we’re not supposed to think that far.

Good of its kind. Cautions for language, violence, and adult situations.

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Swords in the rock

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Above, a very nice little video of the “Sverd i Fjell” (Sword in Rock) monument at Hafrsfjord, near Stavanger, Norway. I’ve been there, briefly, years back. It is, you will not be surprised to learn, my favorite monument in the world. It’s directly north of Sola, where Erling Skjalgsson lived. This is about where he docks his ships in my novels.

But the place is most famous for the battle which the monument commemorates, the Battle of Hafrsfjord, fought (it is thought) in 872. This was a sea battle in which King Harald Fairhair (or Finehair) defeated a coalition of his enemies to secure control over the kernel of what would become the kingdom of Norway. Nobody knows the extent of his actual domains, and (of course) there are historians who doubt his very existence, and whether the battle ever happened.

They’re planning a big celebration of the Battle of Hafrsfjord this summer, and I’m seriously considering going over for it. I can plausibly hope to have the funds – the main thing I need to make up my mind to is the trip itself. Air travel becomes less fun as you age, and it’s become less fun for everybody in recent years. And Norway is not a place for people who have trouble walking. I walk okay, but my range isn’t what it used to be, and my fake hips complain if I overdo it. What I need is to lose some weight. I’m working on that.

I think I’ll regret it if I don’t go.

Goofing, Writing

‘Medieval help desk’

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The video above is quite old now, but I don’t think I’ve ever shared it here. Fits our topic, and it’s in my wheelhouse, too, as the language is Norwegian. It comes from the Norwegian national broadcast service. If you’ve never seen it before, it’s pretty clever.

Today was another of those clear, bright, bitter cold days in Minneapolis. I’ve mentioned the word “apricity” before – it means the warmth you feel when the sun shines on you, warming you a little on one of these polar days. This was an apricitous day.

I went to the gym (8 below) and then went to my tax preparer (about zero). Those two things are the sum of my achievements thus far, but I still felt worn out. Taxes will do that to you. My return is on hold, since it turned out a couple forms I need haven’t arrived in the mail yet. Next year I need to make a later appointment.

Now I’ll try to work on the novel. This thing is kicking my fundament. Every time I do a revision, I find more that needs fixing. I just discovered that in one story line, I put an effect ahead of a cause. This will have to be fixed.

I think it’s a good story, but it’s like a black hole. I like to think the book is smarter than I am, and I just need time to catch up with it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Truth or Die,’ by Jack Lynch

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The sixth volume in the late Jack Lynch’s 1980s detective series starring Pete Bragg is Truth or Die. I like Pete Bragg more and more because a) he’s pre-Woke, and b) he seems to be smoking less pot these days.

Pete’s relationship with his girlfriend, the artist Allison, is developing well, in spite of her reservations about his career as a private eye. He’s keeping a promise to her as Truth or Die begins, spending a weekend with her at the Monterey Jazz Festival. It’s a little awkward, though, when one of the people they run into is Jo Sommers, a beautiful woman Pete used to flirt with in his bartending days. Jo seems to be a compulsive flirt, and Pete can’t deny the attraction, even though she’s married to a prominent local psychologist.

Then the psychologist turns up dead, smothered with a pillow in his den. Jo is arrested for the murder, and appeals to Jack to clear her. Allison gives him limited permission. Pete’s not sure Jo didn’t actually kill her husband, but he soon uncovers evidence leading to old military secrets, secret tapes, and blackmail. Then Allison is endangered, and we get to see Pete in full Lone Ranger mode.

Lots of fun. Not much to object to except for extramarital sex, which seems almost chaste these days. I enjoyed Truth or Die.