I don’t watch a lot of movies anymore, even on home streaming. (A miniseries I worked on, by the way, Gangs of Oslo, is now on Netflix. I haven’t gotten around to watching it yet.) But for some reason I was flipping through the offerings on that same provider a few days ago, and I came on a film I’d never heard of, The Pale Blue Eye, based on a novel by Louis Bayard. In spite of its title, it’s not a Travis McGee story, but a period piece set at West Point in 1830, featuring Edgar Allan Poe. I was intrigued.
Retired detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is summoned to meet the commandant of West Point Military Academy, to investigate the death of a cadet. The young man was found hanged to death, but – bizarrely – his heart was cut out of his body. As Landor begins asking questions, he’s approached by a cadet named Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling), who has unique insights and soon proves himself an invaluable assistant. Landor’s suspicions begin to focus on the family of Dr. Marquis, who did the initial autopsy, as Poe begins falling in love with the doctor’s lovely daughter, who is subject to seizures.
The internet tells me that response to this film has been mixed, but I must say I found it fascinating and effective. It’s beautifully photographed, and the costumes look very authentic to my eye (I’d have to check with my costume historian friend Kelsey to know for sure). Christian Bale does his usual superior work as an alcoholic investigator with a secret sorrow. Harry Melling is absolutely splendid as Poe. First of all, he looks like the guy in the photos. I have no way of knowing if the real Poe had the same kind of nervous tics in real life, but Melling sells it – I believed him entirely.
Robert Duvall also appears, and I didn’t recognize him at all (which is praise for an actor).
Also, witchcraft is treated as a negative thing, which is both historically accurate and gratifying. The ending, with its twist in an epilogue, is a bit confusing, but I’ll buy it.
I recommend The Pale Blue Eye, for grownups. Cautions for mature situations.
I spent the day balancing the pains in my ribs, shoulder and head with painkillers and doing a passable impression of Elizabeth Barrett Browning on the sofa.
I knew nothing of Chris Ould or his Faeroes mystery series before I bought The Blood Strand. But I got a deal on it, and it was set in the Faeroes, a Nordic community I’d never visited fictionally (or in real life) before. I’m used to being depressed by Scandinavian Noir stories, but this one turned out to be a pleasant surprise.
Jan Reyna is an English police detective. He was born in the Faeroes, but his mother divorced his father and took him away when he was very young. Then she died, leaving him to be raised by relatives in England. He only met his father once, and then they got into a fistfight. But now the old man is hospitalized in the Faeroes following an accident and a stroke, and Jan succumbs to his aunt’s pressure to go and see his father while he’s still alive.
Arriving in the Faeroes, whose language he’s entirely forgotten, he finds his father (who turns out to be rich) unable to communicate. He meets his two half-brothers, one openly hostile, the other friendly. He also meets a local detective, Hjalte Hentze, who’s trying to figure out why Jan’s father was found in his car with a shotgun in the footwell, blood on the door, and a briefcase full of money in the trunk. That curiosity only increases when a young man’s body is found washed up on the shore with shotgun wounds. When he asks Jan to help out, Jan has nothing better to do… except for trying to find out why his mother left his father all those years ago.
I liked Jan Reyna and the other characters in The Blood Strand. The descriptions of Faeroese culture and scenery were interesting, and the unfolding mystery kept me fascinated. Though set in a historically Scandinavian setting, this book was not actually written by a Scandinavian, which may explain why it didn’t try to depress me to death. I had a good time reading it, and I look forward to the sequels.
Recommended. Not much offensive content either. References to Christianity (the Faeroese seem to be pretty religious) were mostly respectful.
King Olaf Trygvesson, as painted by my friend (okay, my acquaintance) Anders Kvaale Rue. I’ve never asked him why he pictures Olaf with a haircut documented as being popular with Danes.
Tonight, three more tales from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. Oddly, they’re all about guys named Thorstein. Perhaps the name was a statistical favorite among Icelanders. Or perhaps the name was becoming a go-to for storytellers, like “Jack” in so many British folk tales.
First, there’s “The Tale of Thorstein of the East Fjords.” We’re told that he was “young and fleet of foot,” though those qualities don’t really figure in the story. He is on a pilgrimage to Rome, and while traveling through Norway he comes upon a richly dressed young man defending himself against four attackers. Thorstein decides to intervene and kills three of the attackers. The young man he rescued tells him that once he gets back from Rome, he should go to King Magnus’s (Magnus the Good, I assume) court and see him. Just ask for Styrbjorn. (Styrbjorn was the name of a famous Swedish hero. I don’t know of more than one man who bore that name, and he was long dead by this time.)
One assumes that Thorstein goes to Rome and returns to Norway, though the saga writer fails to mention that. The next scene shows Thorstein showing up at the king’s hall, where he sends a message in, asking for Styrbjorn. All the kings’ men have a good laugh at somebody asking for Styrbjorn (like somebody today asking for Eliot Ness or Frank Sinatra, I suppose), but eventually the king himself silences them, explaining that he himself is this “Styrbjorn.” Thorstein ends up going home to Iceland with a lot of money.
The second tale is “The Tale of Thorstein the Curious.” This Thorstein went to Norway and joined the court of King Harald (Hardrada, I suppose). One day the king assigns him to watch his clothing while he’s taking a bath, and Thorstein can’t resist looking into his bag. There he sees a couple knife handles made from a strange, golden wood. When the king comes out of the bath, he intuits that Thorstein has peeked. Displeased, he demands that Thorstein fulfill a quest or lose his favor. He must fetch the king two more knife handles of the same wood – but he won’t give him a clue as to where such trees grow (considering Harald Hardrada’s history, it might have been anywhere in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Eastern Europe, or Scandinavia). Thorstein eventually fulfills the quest, but only by way of escaping a giant serpent. In an oddly prosaic epilogue, we’re informed that this Thorstein died with Harald in England.
Finally we encounter “The Tale of Thorstein Shiver.” This Thorstein has joined the household of King Olaf (at first I assumed this would be Saint Olaf, but by the end it’s clear that it’s Olaf Trygvesson). One night the king gives a command (for no apparent reason) that no man is to go out to the privy without a buddy. Thorstein wakes in the middle of the night and is reluctant to wake anyone else, so he sneaks out alone. In the privy he encounters a demon. Then follows a sequence in which he asks the demon three times about which damned souls scream the loudest in Hell. The demon tells him about three famous Nordic heroes, describing their sufferings in the fires of perdition, and (at Thorstein’s request) each time screaming in imitation of that hero. Meanwhile, with each question the demon inches closer to Thorstein. But just before the demon can grab him, the church bells start ringing, and the demon flees back where he came from.
In the morning, the king asks how everyone slept. Thorstein confesses his disobedience, but King Olaf isn’t much bothered over that. He explains that he heard the diabolical screaming, and therefore ordered the bells rung, saving Thorstein from Hell.
There’s an interesting addendum. The king asks Thorstein if he felt frightened at any point, and Thorstein says he doesn’t know what fear feels like, though he shivered a little during the demon’s final scream.
This seems to anticipate a motif we find in several Scandinavian folk tales catalogued in the 19th Century – “The Boy Who Did Not Know Fear.” It seems to me that what we’re observing in these stories is a stage in the evolution of the folk tale – the point where stories are still connected to actual historical figures (likely the storytellers’ ancestors), but are growing increasingly extravagant and fabulous in the process of retelling.
When commenting on a book not easily available to readers in this country (I ordered my copy from England), it’s probably appropriate to call my review a reading report. Posting this does you no particular good, but I’ve spent a couple days reading the book (which I wanted for research on my Work In Progress), and I’m gonna get a review out of it, by thunder.
The Vikings in Britain by Henry Loyn was published back in 1995, which is a while ago, I must admit, especially in a rapidly expanding field of knowledge. No doubt much of the research in the book has been superseded, but in aggregate it seems to give a pretty good overview.
In fact, what The Vikings in Britain appears to be is a textbook, designed as a broad introduction. Just the facts, so to speak (so far as they can be determined). The material is presented through a combination of chronological and geographic perspectives, which seemed to me a little confusing. The book is, apparently, part of a series entailing certain format constraints, including length, so the prose is pretty dense.
My sad final impression after reading is that it wasn’t much fun. That makes it ideal for the textbook market, I suppose, but in my opinion there’s no excuse for a book about Vikings being boring. (Look at Viking Legacy for a sterling example of engaging historiography and [cough] translation.) If you happen on a copy of The Vikings in Britain, and want to mainline a lot of information in a minimal number of reading hours, this book might be right for you.
The video above is one I found in my aimless wanderings on YouTube. The thing to bear in mind, if you watch it through (it’s not long) is that while I was watching it the first time, I had no idea what the artisan’s intention was. I thought at first the goal was a kind of Chippendale chair rail, and I simply found it visually engrossing, the same way I used to watch my Windows computer defrag.
And then it became “captive rings” (something I’d never heard of before), and I was astonished. What a wonderful thing, I thought.
And then it came into my mind –
[Let me just break in here with a disclaimer. I think I’ve made it clear before that I don’t believe in extra-biblical revelations, in the sense of treating them as the words of God. If I, or an angel from Heaven, tell you, “I have a new revelation from God for you,” run away.
On the other hand, I don’t doubt that God sometimes speaks to us personally, to encourage or even guide us. This may be a case of that. Or not. Remains to be seen. But I like it enough to share it here.]
So it came into my mind that maybe I’m like that piece of wood.
I’ve probably mentioned, in one or more of my too frequent navel-gazing posts, that the personality I possess now is not the one I was born with. I have it on good authority, from uncles and aunts, that when I was a little boy I was outgoing and friendly. These traits were knocked out of me in my upbringing, leaving me desperately shy and socially awkward.
To make it worse, all my life I’ve been informed by a series of employers (often while they were firing me) that it was precisely those personality traits (the ones I lost) that they wanted and didn’t get from me.
But looking at that woodturning video, it occurred to me, “Maybe I’m like that piece of wood. It didn’t start out to be a set of captive rings. It started out as a perfectly good, useful tree branch. First it was cut off, then it was dried in a kiln, then it was put in a lathe and subjected to a series of cuts and gouges which I can’t help anthropomorphizing as extremely painful.
But the result is something that delighted me. The captive ring piece is, to me, for want of a better word, wonderful.
Just possibly (I thought) I was put through all the stuff I’ve been through to make something wonderful out of me. (My guess would be my books, but who knows? Maybe I said the right words to somebody thirty years ago, and I’ve been riding on that one good act ever since.) I’m reminded of the potter in Jeremiah 18.
Of course, being me, I can’t resist looking at the question from the other side too. One should never forget the wisdom of this old internet meme:
“A good man who cannot die, who lives forever, is cursed,” said Mason. “And an evil man who cannot die is a curse on everyone else.”
The legend of the longaeviis an old one in Christian tradition, and I suspect it probably exists in other cultures as well. Our ancestors believed in Longinus, the centurion who crucified Christ and was cursed not to die till Judgment Day (I employed this legend in my book The Elder King). They also believed in the Wandering Jew, who insulted Christ on His way to crucifixion and was doomed to wander the earth in a similar way. Both legends embody the understanding that, much as we’d like to lengthen our lives, death is in principle a mercy for fallen creatures.
The popular Highlander film and TV franchises took a different approach, but still couldn’t avoid the insight that earthly immortality would entail great sorrow and tragedy, if not evil.
John Nolte offers a new wrinkle on the concept in his recent novel, Borrowed Time. The man who calls himself Joshua Mason has wandered the earth longer than he can remember. If something kills him, he soon reappears under a certain Joshua tree in the Arizona desert. He’d always kept to himself and avoided transient humanity, until he met Doreen, with whom he fell in love and whom he married in secret, making a little family with her and her brain-damaged son in the run-down motel she ran.
To provide for them, Joshua began a secret business, based in the Dark Web. For a high fee, he allows very sick-minded human beings to murder him. He does not realize that the power of the people he’s dealing with, along with the increasing surveillance capacities of the government, will put him on a course that will lead to unleashing unthinkable horror on the world – through the most unlikely conduit you could imagine.
I first encountered author John Nolte on the old Dirty Harry’s Place blog, a fun movie blog. Lots of creativity and interaction. (Can anyone explain why the world abandoned blogs for social media? How long has it been since you’ve had a really good discussion on Facebook or X?) Since then, John has moved on to Breitbart, where he’s a big deal (we’re not friends, but I follow his career with interest). He’s written an effective urban fantasy in Borrowed Time, intended for a wider audience than Christian readers (watch out for language and graphic violence). The story is solid and well-paced. The characters are distinctive and lively. The prose is not polished, and there are a few typos and errors (such as putting Florida on the Pacific Ocean). But all in all this was a well-written, very readable, and gripping book. It moved me at the end.
It occurred to me (and not for the first time) as I read John Sandford’s latest Lucas Davenport novel, Judgment Prey, that these latest books in the series are about an entirely different character than the early Preys were. Back at the start, the emphasis was on street justice, and Lucas seemed to be a borderline psycho. Now he’s a settled family man anchoring stories that push gun control, and Lucas tends to operate as a buffer against violence.
As Judgment Prey opens, Lucas is still recovering from the wounds he received in the big gunfight at the end of the last book. He isn’t 100% yet, but he’s pushing to get back in shape. When one of his superiors asks him to look in on a crime scene, he puts up only formal resistance.
A federal judge has been gunned down in his home, along with his two young sons (the baby in the crib was spared). The widow, Margaret Cooper, discovers the bodies and is traumatized. A half-hearted attempt to make the crime look like a robbery gone wrong doesn’t convince. This was a hit, and it was personal.
Lucas, who is now a federal marshal, is allowed to join in the investigation as a sort of consultant, teaming up with his old buddy, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension agent Virgil Flowers.
The investigation will entail examining the judge’s will, and the organizations he’s involved in. Lucas begins to smell a rat. One of the charities mentioned in his will, Heart/Twin Cities, starts looking pretty sketchy (this could be inspired by recent Twin Cities news in the real world). Which raises questions about its director, a local society figure who seems on closer inspection to be all façade. But he’s got an iron-clad alibi…
There’s a fair amount of dramatic tension in all this, but we’re also following Margaret the widow, who responds to her bereavement with action – she and her best friend are laying plans to trap the killer and shoot him dead.
A well-crafted story. Interesting characters. Cop humor. I got everything I came for in Judgment Prey. Recommended for adults. Cautions for violence and language. The ending is kind of ambiguous and troubling.
I’ve made great strides with the InDesign software I’m struggling with, but the last few intractable problems still defy… tracting. And I don’t have a book to review tonight.
So I offer the video above, from a podcast called “Order of Man” (about which I know naught, but I found nothing objectionable when I watched). It’s about an hour, and it features an interview with Andrew Klavan about his latest novel, The House of Love and Death (which you really ought to read). He also discusses his journey to faith.
“It is perfectly possible, I suppose,” said Lord Peter to his wife, over breakfast, “for someone to be murdered while doing something she does not usually do, or behaving in a way unaccustomed to her. But it is an affront to the natural feelings of a criminologist, all the same.”
I was aware that Dorothy L. Sayers had begun a Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane novel back in the 1930s and abandoned it, leaving behind some isolated scenes and a tentative outline. And that the late author Jill Patton Walsh had completed the novel, Thrones, Dominations, which was published in 1999. But I hadn’t taken the trouble to read it. I feared that history would have contaminated it, especially in terms of feminism. Miss Sayers was certainly a feminist in her time, but the world has changed, and modern readers (we are told) demand certain thematic adjustments. I apply the same avoidance to the contemporary Battle of the Sexes as I do to the challenges of modern dating.
But a deal on Thrones, Dominations showed up, and I bought it. And by and large I was very pleased.
The story begins not long after the end of Busman’s Honeymoon. Lord Peter and Harriet are in Paris, still on their honeymoon. There in a restaurant they encounter a couple of other newlyweds, the London theatrical investor (“angel”) Laurence Harwell and his wife Rosamund. Rosamund is the daughter of a convicted embezzler who spent time in prison, but has overcome that social handicap through the sheer power of her ethereal beauty.
Then the story shifts to London, and I must admit it drags a bit in terms of plot. We spend a lot of time satisfying fans’ curiosity about how Lord Peter and Harriet will organize their new household. Interesting for that group (of which I am one), but I think it makes for a slow dramatic start. However, eventually a murder does happen, and the logical suspect has a solid alibi, while another fellow looks pretty guilty but Lord Peter has his doubts. It all leads to one of those alibi-breaking puzzles that’s so characteristic of Miss Sayers’ work, which was very gratifying. The conclusion was tragic and touching.
I saw occasional traces of a modern sensibility in the story, but all in all, Jill Patton Walsh did a very good job writing the kind of story Miss Sayers would have produced if she hadn’t lost interest. There were moments when the characters reminded me why I love them, and that made for delightful reading.
I don’t generally like the Wimsey/Vane novels as well as the earlier stories, because I find Harriet a little dull. She’s essentially the author without her Christian faith, and Sayers without God would be a kind of a bore, in my opinion.
But that’s just me.
The only serious error I noticed was that one major character changed hair color over the course of the story (unless I got them confused with someone else).
Thrones, Dominations is, overall, a highly successful literary experiment, and is recommended, especially for Wimsey fans.
So we went to take a look. It took an hour and forty minutes to get there, first south and then west. A lonely road on the edge of the Glades. Lumpy asphalt running string-straight through wetlands past wooded hammocks where the white birds sat on bare trees like Christmas doodads, thinking white bird thoughts.
As I think I may possibly have mentioned before, I’m a hopeless fan of John D. MacDonald, and especially his Travis McGee novels, about a Florida boat bum and “salvage specialist” who recovers people’s stolen property and keeps half the value as his fee. The Lonely Silver Rain holds a special place in the series, as its 21st and final installment. It was published in 1985, and the author died the following year.
Trav gets a call from Billy Ingraham, an old friend who’s a millionaire and a widower, who recently retired, acquired a trophy wife, and had a yacht custom-built to his specifications. The boat had barely gotten in the water when somebody stole it. Billy has heard that Trav once found somebody else’s stolen yacht. Could he do the same for him? Trav explains that the first recovery was kind of a fluke, but Billy promises a generous finder’s fee. Helped by his best friend, the economist Myer, Trav makes a plan to use aerial photography and systematic analysis to try to find the needle in the haystack. And, to his own surprise, he does find it.
But when he boards the yacht, now abandoned in an isolated bay in the Keys, he finds it trashed, with three corpses inside. A young man and two young women have been tortured and murdered here. Trav recognizes the signs – this is a drug deal gone bad. This is nothing for outsiders to mess with.
Trav backs out carefully, covering his tracks, and phones the Coast Guard anonymously to alert them. Then he tells Billy to forget he was ever involved.
Too late, it turns out. One of the dead women was the daughter of a high-level Peruvian gangster. Someone has decided that somebody must be made to pay for the murders, and somehow they’ve identified Travis McGee as the scapegoat. He’ll have to either handle the problem or find a way to disappear forever.
I remember that, when this book came out, some reviewers commented on what they saw as a weary, graying quality. The author’s chronological plan was for Travis McGee to age at a somewhat slower rate than people in the real world. Under that plan, McGee was now middle-aged, but still had good years in him (though he worries now and then about losing a half-step). But MacDonald was approaching 70 himself at the time (which even I admit is old, though I’m older than that now), and he was clearly experiencing intimations of mortality. There’s even a fleeting moment in this book, a sort of throwaway scene, where Trav acknowledges the possibility of the Great Beyond sending us messages.
The Lonely Silver Rain may not be the top entry in the Travis McGee series, but it’s written with all the skill and craft of a consummate professional. Plus, as a special bonus, there’s an episode at the end that adds a (possibly unintentional but touching ) coda that rounds out a classic detective series rather nicely.
