All posts by Lars Walker

Fiction, Reviews

‘Arms and White Samite,’ by B. A. Patty

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What Arthur saw was nothing like what Moren saw. He saw no silver trees, nor the shining suns of souls, nor the blue glow of possibility, of hope, or of longing. Arthur saw before him the legends, rising up in shapes like griffins and dragons, growing about him in the way that lilies grow up like miracles in a forest where once stood some forgotten cottage. They stole his breath, and for a time it was so quiet in his tent that even the roar of celebration outside seemed to vanish away.

B. A. Patty blogs at Grim’s Hall, one of the blogs I’ve been following for years. He’s a reader of my novels too. But he’s even less aggressive about marketing his novel, Arms and White Samite, than I am in regard to mine. In fact, I’d forgotten he had one until he offered a deal recently, and I picked it up. It’s an impressive book, one that deserves greater recognition than it’s received.

Our hero is Moren, a warrior of Arthur’s Company of the Wall (the book is set in “King” Arthur’s original historical context, with certain supernatural intrusions). One day a lady dressed in white rides into Arthur’s hall, pursued by a great, fearsome knight armored in black. In spite of Arthur’s men’s attempts to protect her, the knight carries her off. Moren takes upon himself the quest of rescuing the lady. He follows her through a forest, where he rescues another lady who becomes his companion, and later into a fortress, where he is taken prisoner. A group of his brothers follow to help – or rescue – him. Meanwhile, the Saxons are harrying the land, and Arthur faces the challenges and sacrifices of total war against an enemy led by a king who is more than human.

For me, the greatest appeal of the Arthurian stories has always been, more than the tales of chivalry and valor, the hints of mystery behind it all – ancient names of places lost to history, shadowy characters who seem not quite human in some undefined way. Arms and White Samite is rich in those elements. It’s actually as much about the realms of faery as about this world (though the battle scenes are excellent, and seem historically plausible).

Quite a lot of time is spent in discussions about the intersection of this world and the Otherworld, and the nature of life and eternity. Questions of theodicy (the problem of evil) are central. Although the matrix of the philosophy seems Christian, there are elements that seem Buddhist and syncretist. This left me puzzled, but I’m not sure I understood it well enough to judge.

There were a couple typos (at least I think they were typos; perhaps I misunderstood the antique diction), and on very rare occasions the author made the questionable artistic choice of using exclamation points in exposition.

Still, all in all, I think Arms and White Samite is the kind of book C. S. Lewis would have liked very much.

Authors, Poetry, Reading

What’s in an Oscar?

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Tonight, because such exercises please me, I wish to discuss (which means I write, you read) the history of a name. The name is Oscar. Not a terribly common name, but it shows up now and then in unexpected places. Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple. Eddie Murphy’s character in Beverly Hills Cop. Sylvester Stallone did a film called Oscar. And of course – speaking of films – there’s the famous statuette of the Academy Awards – said to have been informally named by Academy librarian and historian Margaret Herrick, who remarked that it reminded her of her uncle Oscar.

Also Oscar the Grouch.

The book I reviewed yesterday, Armored, featured a Mexican character named Oscar. But I think of it primarily as a Scandinavian name. So I wondered, where did it come from and what does it mean?

My finely honed librarian’s skills led me to an arcane scholarly source known to insiders as Wikipedia. There I learned the story of the name, which is not without points of interest.

What does Oscar mean? It actually comes (purely by chance) from two different languages. In Old English, it means “Spear of the Gods” (cognate with the Norse name Asgeir).

But its modern use springs from Old Irish, where it means “One Who Loves Deer.”

The name was one of those indigenous ones that turned out insufficiently popular to survive the coming of Christianity, with its multitude of saints’ names to hang on babies. So it went out of use and was largely forgotten.

Then along came a man named James MacPherson (1736-1796), a Scottish writer, politician, and all-around scoundrel. Though he sprang from an old Jacobite (Stuart-supporting) family, he jumped wholeheartedly over to the Hanoverians (the English conquerors) and profited thereby. He also participated in the Highland Clearances, evicting poor cotters from their homes so their lands could be repurposed for sheep grazing. Countless Scots were made homeless by this treacherous betrayal of ancient trust.

But McPherson is best remembered for a series of poems called the Ossian Cycle, which he claimed he collected from ancient Scottish lays he learned from simple bards. Most scholars and critics have long agreed that McPherson wrote them himself, throwing in a few borrowings from Scottish and Irish folklore.

Whatever their source, the published poems were a huge success with the reading public. The Romantic Movement was blossoming just then, and people were hungry for tales of high adventure in ancient times – tales that came from somewhere further north than Rome or Athens. I’ve written here before about the popularity of Tegner’s Saga of Frithjof. The Lay of the Nibelungs and the Icelandic sagas were also objects of fascination. The Ossian Cycle fit right in.

Three of the main characters in the Ossian poems are Fingal, the great hero, Ossian, his son, who is supposed to be the poet, and his son Oscar, now dead.

Among McPherson’s many admirers was no less a figure than Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France. He hung the name on his godson, Joseph Bernadotte, son of his marshal Charles Jean Bernadotte. Charles Jean would go on to become king of Sweden (later of Norway too), and Joseph was eventually crowned King Oscar I. Thus did Oscar become a popular name with Scandinavians.

So hail to you, if your name is Oscar. Or if you live in Ossian, Iowa (nice town; I’ ve been there).

Fiction, Reviews

‘Armored,’ by Mark Greaney

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Mark Greaney is the author of the very impressive Gray Man thriller series. I’ve enjoyed them, though I haven’t kept up with them recently. But I saw he’d started a new series, about security specialist Josh Duffy. I got a deal on Armored, so I checked it out. Greaney still knows how to write a gripping story.

Joshua Duffy, private security operative, lost a leg in Beirut, in a heroic action to protect a client’s wife. This left him in the humiliating position of being unable to find any job better than mall cop. Even more embarrassing, his wife is working nights cleaning offices – and making more money than he is.

So when he runs into an old buddy at the mall, and learns that he’s been hired for a job protecting a UN delegation tasked with making peace between drug cartels in Mexico, he asks the friend to get him in. He does not tell him about his missing leg. To his surprise, he gets the job, and soon he’s flying south of the border with a ragtag collection of bottom-of-the-barrel bodyguards – the company they’re working for doesn’t have the best reputation.

Theirs is a mission marked for disaster – and not by chance. Josh and his new buddies turn out to be nothing more than counters in a big game being played by high-level players, who have no plans to let any of them go home alive.

Plotting a story like this one has to be a daunting task – I’m not sure I could do it. The action tends toward what I like to call the “cinematic” – the kind you believe when you see it on a theater screen, but which seems less plausible when reading. That fortune which proverbially favors the bold requires some pretty intricate choreography of events to achieve in a story where every bend of the road brings a daunting new setback. I never entirely believed this story, but it was just believably enough – and exciting enough – to keep me riveted.

I enjoyed Armored immensely, and recommend it without reservation. Cautions for language and violence. References to Christian faith are uniformly respectful.

Writing

Writer’s journal: Dormancy and perfectionism

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Photo credit Glenn Carstens-Peters. glenncarstenspeters. Unsplash license.

I imagine some of you are more interested in how my Work In Progress is coming along than in my flounderings in the unfamiliar waters of book narration. So I’ll tell you about that part of the business tonight.

The Baldur Game continues dormant for the moment. This is a good thing. Every writer (except for those wild geniuses who can solo on the first flight) has had the experience of getting a piece just as good as they believe they possibly can get it, and then they put it aside for one reason or another, and discover, on taking it up again, all kinds of howlers and barbarisms they’d never guessed at. It’s like the wallpaper in your house. After a while it goes invisible. Time away lets you see it with fresh eyes again, as if it were someone else’s work. And someone else’s work is infinitely easier to critique.

So I’ve got the book out right now for reading with three friends, whom I’ve instructed to be bloody, bold, and resolute. Give it to me straight. I may not be able to take it, but I’ll pretend I can. Act like a professional.

That’s what being a professional means, really.

One of the readers has already started offering suggestions, and some of them seem to me quite good. But following them up will mean thinking some things through, plot-wise. Plotting kills me. I’m not a plotter by nature. Four characters in The Baldur Game are noted as good chess players – Erling Skjalgsson (my hero, in case you’re new here), King Olaf of Norway, King Knut of Denmark, and Jarl Ulf of Denmark. I wonder how well I’ve portrayed those men, these good plotters. I’m told I don’t write women very well. I wonder if I write leaders well.

Then there’s the eternal problem of when to stop tinkering. There are writers, I’m told, who never get to the point where they think a work is good enough. There’s a character in Balzac’s Pére Goriot, if I remember correctly (I read it in college), who has been working on a novel for years, but has never gotten past the first sentence. He sits down to write each day, and immediately finds something wrong with that one sentence, and then spends his whole session revising it again. We know he’ll never complete the novel. His aspiration surpasses human capabilities.

I’m not like that, thank goodness. Eventually I do come to a point where I’m pretty sure that if I tinker with the thing any more, I’ll just spoil it.

It’s also possible I’m just lazy, and have thus failed to achieve my true potential.

But that sounds silly to me.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Kill Chase,’ by M. K. Farrar

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I feel cheated. I was tricked into reading Kill Chase, a book I wouldn’t have read if I’d known more about its author, and what’s worse, I liked it.

Two fishermen on the River Avon, near Bristol, England, hook a nasty catch – a severed human arm wrapped in a plastic bag. They call the police, who drag the river and find more body parts – from two different corpses.

Assigned to the case is Detective Inspector Ryan Chase, who’s having a hard time of it these days. He’s still mourning the death of his daughter, and his divorce from his wife. He works to distract his mind, and has developed symptoms of OCD.

He and his team have little to go on – how do you identify who dumped body parts in a river? Their investigations will lead them into the world of the homeless, and the good samaritans who serve them – but victims and victimizers can be hard to distinguish from one another.

Kill Chase was one of the more compelling books I’ve read in a while. The emphasis was on character, and I cared about Ryan Chase’s life and that of his partner, a young woman caring for her mentally disabled brother. I cared about the other characters too.

At the end, when I saw the author’s bio, I realized the reason for this emotion-intensive approach (Warning: sexism follows). The author, M. K. Farrar, is a woman. I should have guessed. Nowadays, authors who use initials instead of first names are usually female. Most of the time I watch out for that.

The author’s sex probably also explains the abundance of female police in this book. The Bristol force appears to be about 60 percent women, and all the important cops (except for Ryan himself) are female.

But I can’t deny that the author did a pretty good job of portraying her male hero. Fair play to her, as they say in Ireland.

Kill Chase is an impressive police procedural, Recommended.

Uncategorized

Spring achieved, and a ‘writing’ update

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Photo credit: Matt Botsford. Unsplash license.

Before I get to my tale of angst, I feel I ought to note that today was beautiful in terms of weather. Nearly 70 degrees. It was the first day of the year I slid the screens down in a couple windows and opened them for fresh air. I always feel an easing of the soul when this happens. The dark time is ended. We’ve made it through alive.

I have another ‘writing’ update – and the collective holds its collective breath. (No breath for you! Your social credit score has fallen below permissible levels!)

As I’ve told you before, I’ve been plugging along, trying to learn Audacity, the free recording software that most aspiring book narrators seem to start with. Audacity is quite sophisticated, really, which is part of what scares me.

Thinking back to radio school (Brown Institute, Minneapolis, 1980), I enjoyed a peculiar place in my class. Aside from being one of the oldest students, I was generally considered (or so I remember it) the best copy reader and the worst engineer. A popular, oft-repeated story told of how I panicked in the control room one day, reached desperately for some dial or other, and went over backward in my chair (it had casters), so that I presented the spectacle, through the control booth window, of my feet waving in the air.

This story was completely true.

The disconnect I seem to have with my hands – sort of like a seven-second delay – has always prevented me from handling any mechanical device with confidence, from a can opener to an automobile. Also, I seem to lack the common male aptitude for spatial visualization. So I’m clumsy with any kind of equipment. Typing is a repetitive and minimalistic task, so I can handle that. I’m not much good for anything more demanding.

But today, my drilling with Audacity – just recording and playing and editing a little, throwing my work away at the end of each session – seems to have begun to bear fruit. I’m feeling a little more confident with it. Not a master, but not a stranger in town anymore. That’s gratifying.

One of my major regrets in my life comes from those radio school days. One of my instructors, a professional broadcaster who taught as a side gig, offered to help me get into voiceover work. He considered me talented enough to make it in that business. I was flattered, and made a preliminary demo reel, just for his critique.

He critiqued it. Suggested some improvements.

I was embarrassed that it wasn’t perfect, and I gave up.

This was stupid. I had a chance to get into a field where I could have prospered. But that never-silenced Voice In My Head argued me out of trying any more. My whole life could have been different if I’d accepted the criticism, made improvements, and kept at it until I made the thing work.

The Voice In My Head, I realized recently, doesn’t really hate me. It’s just terrified of failure. It’s trying to protect me from getting hurt. It fails proactively, because it’s less painful to just surrender at the start, rather than trying and falling on my face.

This book narration thing, it seems to me, is a second chance. This time I’m going to try. This time I’m going to take the risk.

Honestly, what do I have to lose?

Fiction, Reviews

‘Holy Disorders,’ by Edmund Crispin

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Edmund Crispin (real name Robert Bruce Montgomery) was one of the great names of England’s Golden Age of Detection (under the Montgomery name he was a noted composer of music in various fields, ranging from saucy film scores to reverent sacred works). His most famous literary creation is Professor Gervase Fenn, an English professor at a fictional Oxford college. Holy Disorders is one of Crispin’s later works.

The story starts with Fenn’s friend Geoffrey Vintner, a composer of church music, receiving a muddled telegram from Fenn, demanding that he travel immediately to the fictional cathedral town of Tolnbridge – and bring a butterfly net! The lengthy description of Geoffrey’s journey, during which he is attacked three times by thugs, has a fantastical, dreamlike quality that reminded me a little of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday.

When he arrives in Tolnbridge, Geoffrey finds that Fenn has completely forgotten about him – which isn’t unusual. But the cathedral organist has been attacked and is in the hospital, and Fenn is investigating. That very night, the bishop is killed in the cathedral, and the organist is murdered in the hospital. Fenn and Geoffrey go to work comparing alibis and witness accounts, eventually uncovering hidden, unsuspected evil.

Holy Disorders is fairly disordered in its own right, in terms of plot. The puzzle is complicated, and the action often less than plausible. I also have to say that I figured out the murderer’s identity before I was supposed to.

The story had other problems too. I liked the writing – very classic English and erudite. But my main problem with the book was that our hero, Gervase Fenn, was one of the most unlikeable heroes I’ve ever encountered (not the worst, but hardly endearing). He shares with Sherlock Holmes a tendency to rudeness. But Holmes possessed some manners, and was only rude when necessary. Fenn genuinely doesn’t seem to care – which makes his occasional moral pronouncements sound unconvincing.

There are many churchmen in this book, and none of them are very saintly, while a couple are unworthy characters. The attitude to Christianity overall seems positive though, though the author’s theology appears weak. I was disturbed by attempts to partly justify the old witch trials (this is a subject on which I have strong views).

Modern readers will be amused by the depiction of “marihuana” in this story. I loathe pot personally, but we know today that it’s not anything like as addictive as it’s portrayed here.

There are no sex scenes, though I was surprised by a scene where a couple swim together in the nude. Very racy for a book published in 1940.

My final judgment on Holy Disorders is that it has its pleasures, but is not a great mystery novel. Edmund Crispin, perhaps, deserves another reading, selecting a better example of his craft. I actually enjoyed the book more than not, in spite of its weaknesses.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Deep Shadow,’ by Nick Sullivan

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Boone Fischer is a divemaster who works guiding scuba excursions on the remote island of Bonaire in the Caribbean. He likes the job, but is restless, so he’s taken another job on another island. The problem is that he’s now falling in love with Emily, an English girl he’s working with, and hasn’t yet worked up the nerve to tell her he’s leaving.

One day while diving, Boone spots something he’s never seen before – a submarine. It’s not military or scientific. Emily snaps a couple pictures of it. These pictures prove of interest to two American customers – who just happen to be military. They make inquiries, and learn that there are rumors that a Venezuelan drug cartel has hired Russian engineers to build them a large sub for smuggling purposes.

What none of them know is that the cartel itself has been betrayed – one of their engineers is a Muslim extremist, and his plan is to take the sub and use it not for smuggling – but as a massive bomb.

That’s the premise of Nick Sullivan’s Deep Shadow. Boone, our hero, aside from being young and strong and agile, is also fortunate in being an expert in Brazilian martial arts. He’ll need them. In fact, luck plays, perhaps, too large a part in this story from a plotting perspective. The Caribbean is a large body of water – what are the odds Luke would stumble on the submarine, not once, but twice, purely by happenstance?

Overall, there was nothing wrong with Deep Shadow. It was a well-told, exciting adventure story. The prose was professional. I found it a little simplistic – it reminded me of those kids’ novels I used to read, where the boy gets involved with spies or detectives or something, figures out what’s wrong before the adults do, and ends up the hero. However, Deep Shadow makes no claim to be Dostoevski – it promises a rousing adventure story, and it delivers just that.

There’s violence, but not too graphic, and hints of sex but no sex scenes. If you’re looking for uncomplicated action entertainment, perhaps for reading on the beach, Deep Shadow is a good choice.

Reviews

Watching Jeremy Brett’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’

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I’ve found myself watching some of the old Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes episodes from the 1990s, on YouTube. They’re all there, I think, or at least most of them. I’d forgotten how truly excellent they were, especially at the beginning. Toward the end, Jeremy Brett was visibly unwell and putting on weight, and those scripts, based on inferior Conan Doyle stories, were (in my opinion) weaker.

I was surprised to discover that Jeremy Brett played Freddy in the 1964 film version of “My Fair Lady.” He was good in that role, but playing what they used to call “Juvenile” parts was not his true destiny.  (I always thought Freddy should have gotten the girl, and indeed that’s what happens in G. B. Shaw’s original play.)

Granada Productions made a serious effort to do Sherlock Holmes in a manner faithful to the original stories. The series bowled me over back in the day, and it has aged excellently. Brett got the job because he resembled Sidney Paget’s original illustrations – except that Paget’s Holmes was pretty bald. The sets were great, the costumes were great, and Brett’s performance was at once faithful to Doyle’s descriptions and wildly original. Doyle tells us that Holmes would have made a great actor, and Brett plays him as an actor, affecting theatrical gestures and vocal flourishes. One wonders whether the man is quite sane (Brett’s life story suggests he wasn’t entirely), but we always wondered about Holmes the same way.

If you’re looking for top-shelf literary adaptations, check these out.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Twist of a Knife,’ by Anthony Horowitz

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Anthony Horowitz is a very famous author and screenwriter whom I don’t recall ever hearing of before. (Though he created both Midsomer Murders and Foyle’s War.) I got a chance to read The Twist of A Knife, book 4 in his Hawthorne and Horowitz series, and found it distinctive, well-crafted, and entertaining. Also a little weird. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

In this series, apparently, author Horowitz has cast his real-life self as the narrator. References to his own life seem to be authentic (I have no way of checking). But here he has invented a situation (I assume it’s fictional) where he’s gotten involved with an enigmatic private eye known only as Hawthorne. They solve cases together, and Horowitz turns them into bestselling books. Hawthorne appears to be somewhat autistic. Certainly peculiar. He was kicked off the police force, lives in a sterile flat, and never talks about his life. He keeps his own counsel entirely, and Horowitz can never tell what he’s thinking. He’s not above petty revenge when he feels insulted. There are echoes of Holmes and Watson here, but Hawthorne is Holmesian in a highly distilled form.

As The Twist of a Knife opens, Horowitz is telling Hawthorne that he wants to end their association. The books they’ve produced have done well, but it’s all been too intense for him. He wants to go back to his quiet life of ordinary writing. Anyway, his first West End play is about to open. He hopes this will be the beginning of a stellar playwrighting career, a new stage in his life.

The first night seems to go well. But critic Margaret Throsby is in the audience – the most hated critic in London. She appears at the first night party and insults the cast, and then writes a scathing review. Soon after that, she’s dead – stabbed to death with a dagger which happens to belong to Anthony Horowitz. The police question him, and he suddenly finds himself in personal need of Hawthorne’s detective skills – but will Hawthorne be willing to help?

The tone is generally light, though the dramatic tension is elevated enough. Horowitz is not a great prose stylist, and his characterizations are (in my opinion) a little superficial. But the plot was extremely neat and clever. The book succeeds primarily on the author’s inventiveness, and that is formidable.

The author also deserves credit for venturing into the dangerous territory of discussing race and “cultural appropriation.” He does it in a safe way, by making the minority concerned one whose actual presence in England is negligible, but I think he was brave to address it at all.

The classic Agatha Christie “payoff” scene was artfully done. There was even a positive Narnia reference.

The Twist of a Knife is a professionally crafted detective entertainment that will particularly delight fans of the Cozy subgenre. Worth the price for the entertainment.