All posts by Lars Walker

Fiction, Reviews

‘Trouble Is My Business,’ by Raymond Chandler

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“Her eyes were wide-set and there was thinking room between them.”

“I felt terrible. I felt like an amputated leg.”

“He had his right hand in the side pocket of the coat, and under the derby a pair of scarred eyebrows and under the eyebrows a pair of eyes that had as much expression as the cap on a gas tank.”

Apparently I have already read all the stories in Trouble Is My Business, a collection of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe short stories, since they are taken from the collection, The Simple Art of Murder which I know I read a while back. But I didn’t remember them, and so had the pleasure of discovery all over again.

The stories included in this particular collection are “Trouble Is My Business,” “Finger Man,” “Goldfish,” and “Red Wind.” These stories were not, in fact, originally Marlowe stories at all (according to Wikipedia), but pulp stories Chandler wrote about a couple other detective characters, adapted to cash in on Marlowe’s popularity. Which relieves me a little, because the hero of “Trouble Is My Business” has a serious drinking problem. I mean, Philip Marlowe certainly liked his booze, but this guy (John Dalmas, according to the listing in Wikipedia) is putting it away at a rate that indicates serious maintenance alcoholism, and I wouldn’t give his liver many more years.

One doesn’t go to Raymond Chandler for great plotting. We read him mostly for his characters and his prose and his evocation of a time and place. I didn’t think the writing here was up to Chandler’s very best standards, but there are plenty of good lines: “She wasn’t beautiful, she wasn’t even pretty, but she looked as if things would happen where she was.”

Objectionable material was mostly limited to racial slurs. The cursing was mainly the sort of thing you hear in old movies, like “Nerts!” There’s no sex as such, though there’s plenty of sexual tension – at one point Marlowe kisses a married woman, and the author skips describing the actual kiss in the same way later writers would skip a sex scene.

I had a blast reading Trouble Is My Business. Recommended for hard-boiled fans.

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Words spoken and misunderstood

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Radio Announcer Markus Rautio in the studio, ca. 1930. Photo credit: Yle Archives. Unsplash license.

This continues to be a strange time in my disordered life. I’m still feeling the effects of finishing my great life project. There’s no reason I can’t start another great project, of course. Or several smaller ones. One must fill one’s time after all. Sedentary though I am by nature, my brain, I find, needs to be doing stuff. So I drag myself out of bed at 6:30 a.m. and (for the present) work on the art and science of book narration. I’m taking it in small steps, as Jordan Peterson recommends, laboring to overcome my technophobia through familiarization. And it’s working. I am getting more accustomed to it. For the present I’m just recording the instructional book I bought, to desensitize myself to the hardware and the software and the protocols. But I now begin to dimly envision myself actually recording one of my books. Or several. The Epsom books – I still think I’ll need to acquire an Irishman for the Erling series.

Here’s a thought of no importance whatever: It actually relates to narration – as narration is a branch of the broader field of voice acting and announcing. And I’m an old radio hand – best copy reader in my broadcast school class, worst recording engineer.

When I was but a wee tot, I used to hear announcers on the radio telling me that such and such a program was “brought to you by XXXXXX Company.”

And – this was before I knew how to read or spell – I heard the word “brought” as “brokt.” Once I did learn to spell, a few years later, I found that the word in fact did have a couple letters inside it that would work for the “k” sound, sort of – the “gh.” But I also learned that the “gh” wasn’t pronounced. The word was pronounced simply “brot.”

But recently, while watching a couple series on Amazon Prime (“Reacher” Season 3 and “The House of David,” since you ask) I heard the announcer saying that at least one of these programs was brought to me by… I forget what company. But I am certain she (it was a she) in fact pronounced the word “brokt.” So that the phrasing went “brok to you.”

The “gh” in “brought,” of course, is a residue of obsolete pronunciation. Whenever we find such strange, unused letters in an English word, they’re usually the shadow of a past genuine pronunciation. In olden times, the word was in fact pronounced something like “brokt.” Or “brocht.”

I wonder if that pronunciation by professional announcers (I am adamant that’s what they’re saying; I’m not just delusional) harkens unconsciously back to that antique English. Or maybe its just the way the human tongue naturally curls when set to the work of pronouncing those particular sounds.

I clearly remember ads on that same station (it was the Faribault, Minnesota station, specializing in Old Time [that means oompah] music, advertising Lockwood Auto Company. But I remember that I heard it as Lockwood “L-O” Company. That one, I’ll grant you, I got wrong. Made no sense at all, but when you’re a kid lots of things don’t make sense.

Authors, Non-fiction, Reviews

‘P.G. Wodehouse In His Own Words,’ by Barry Day and Tony Ring

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I took to American food from the start like a starving Eskimo flinging himself on a portion of blubber. The poet Keats, describing his emotions on first reading Chapman’s Homer, speaks of himself as feeling like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken. Precisely so did I feel … when the waiter brought me my first slab of strawberry shortcake … ‘No matter if it puts an inch on my waistline,’ I said to myself, ‘I must be in on this.’

There are biographies of P.G. Wodehouse out there; I haven’t gotten around to reading any of them. But a deal showed up on P.G. Wodehouse In His Own Words, and I figured I’d give it a try. It’s neither a long nor greatly illuminating work, but it is an opportunity to revisit a lot of Wodehouse’s best stuff, which can’t help being entertaining.

The scheme here is to go through the facts of the author’s biography, relating them to various quotations from his works. This book’s authors, Barry Day and Tony Ring, admit that we don’t know for sure how Wodehouse’s thinking worked, and we can’t always rely on his own statements on the subject – he considered himself rather a dull fellow, and embroidered his statements accordingly.  But overall I think I learned a little reading it.

There isn’t a lot of drama in the story, except of course for the lamentable account of Wodehouse and his wife being detained by the Germans during World War II, and his grievous error in making recordings that the Germans used for propaganda. This mistake resulted in his never returning to England (though he could have gone back after a time, and the queen knighted him in absentia), but becoming a US citizen. The authors take what I consider the correct view – that Wodehouse dropped a brick but merely through thoughtlessness. And regretted it.

I did notice one error in the book. The authors believe (no doubt deceived by Jeeves’s glamor) that valets stand higher in the social order “Downstairs” than butlers. This is wrong. The butler was king of the servants in an aristocratic household. If Bertie had married and set up a stately home, I expect Jeeves would have been promoted to that lofty office.

But otherwise, I had a good time with P.G. Wodehouse In His Own Words. Recommended.

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‘I Cheerfully Refuse,’ by Leif Enger

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The horizon was dirty and the waves were back to horses. Sometimes a gust knocked one’s mane clean off and scattered it abroad. The wind remembered ice.

You may recall that I’m a big fan of Leif Enger, who not only writes like an angel but is a fellow Minnesotan. So I was happy to see (how did I miss it?) that he had a new novel out – I Cheerfully Refuse.

I’m sorry to say I was disappointed by this book. This wasn’t the sort of thing I looked for from the author of Peace Like a River. However, since it’s beyond dispute that Enger is both smarter than I and a better writer, I may have simply misunderstood him.

I Cheerfully Refuse is a postapocalyptic story – but not the usual kind with zombies or Mad Max societal ferality. The America of this book, about a generation in the future, I guess, is controlled by sinister powers known as the “astronauts,” who dominate business and politics from the east coast. But before that there was apparently a takeover by “hard-shell patriots” who burned books in “fundie bonfires.” Now life goes on in America, but the roads are bad, the electricity sporadic, the air and water polluted, and many communities exercise vigilante law.

Rainy (short for Rainier), our hero and narrator, is a house painter and part-time gig musician (electric bass) in the community of Icebridge (not far from Greenstone, the setting of Enger’s novel, Virgil Wander) on the shore of Lake Superior. His beloved wife (or partner, I wasn’t sure) is Lark, who runs a used book shop. Theirs is a happy life, and they get on well with their neighbors.

Then Kellan arrives. Kellan is a starving wanderer. It’s soon clear that he’s an escapee from one of the “medical ships” where human experimentation is done. Harboring such a fugitive is illegal, but Rainy and Lark take him in. He has something to trade for their hospitality – a rare copy of a book Lark has been searching for all her life.

But the authorities come for them, and before long Rainy’s world has been shattered. He flees in a sailboat, with no plan except a vague idea of returning to the Slate Islands, where he and Lark had a happy interlude years before. But he’s a hunted man now. In time he will acquire a companion, a nine-year-old girl he rescues from an abusive home. But it’s a cold world on the great lake with the law on your trail.

I Cheerfully Refuse is as well-written as you’d expect from an author of Enger’s genius. But his previous books have carried a gentle but pervasive odor of Christianity – sometimes even explicitly Christian. There’s a sort of Christianity here, too, but it’s the sentimental kind – a Rousseauean conception that people are basically good and only do wrong because society is out of skew. That all legal punishment is evil, and everyone should just be forgiven and set free.

I perceived (perhaps I’m paranoid) a political tone here that I’ve never seen in Enger before. As if he’s one of those panicked by the rise of our current president, who believes all the stereotypes about American conservatives, especially religious ones, as cultural troglodytes: “There was a sinuous distrust of text and its defenders.”

I might point out that it is not the conservative schools that are turning out illiterate graduates. It’s not the conservatives who try to purge the classics from curricula. It’s not the conservatives who design ugly, brutalist buildings and tape bananas to walls and call it art.

As I said, maybe I misunderstood. Maybe there’s a rich Christian subtext here that passed over my head. After all, big Pharma is a major villain, and there is a plot line in there arguing against assisted suicide.

All I can say is that I Cheerfully Refuse is a well-written book that disappointed this fan.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Mr. Mulliner Speaking,’ by P. G. Wodehouse

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People who enjoyed a merely superficial acquaintance with my nephew Archibald (said Mr. Mulliner) were accustomed to set him down as just an ordinary pinheaded young man. It was only when they came to know him better that they discovered their mistake. Then they realized that his pin-headedness, so far from being ordinary, was exceptional.

Most P. G. Wodehouse readers are familiar with the Jeeves stories, and usually with the Blandings Castle stories too. But there is another substantial series of short stories that sometimes gets overlooked. These are the Mr. Mulliner stories, in which the venerable Mr. Mulliner sits with his drink in the bar parlor of a pub called The Angler’s Rest, regaling his audience with stories of the adventures of his innumerable relations. Often these stories involve a feckless young man of the usual Wodehouse type, who overcomes some obstacle to his marriage to the girl he loves. Usually the solution to the problem is purely nonsensical, based on some character’s unexpected personal quirks. The quality of the mirth varies from story to story, but some of Wodehouse’s best flights of fancy can be found in this category.

About half the stories in this volume, Mr. Mulliner Speaking, however, exhibit a different formula. This is because (and I was not aware of this, having not read these particular stories before) one of Mr. Mulliner’s relatives turns out to be a certain Miss Roberta Wickham. “Bobbie” Wickham is a character who pops up from time to time in the Jeeves/Wooster stories, and may have shown up at Blandings Castle too (I can’t recall). But whenever Bobbie appears, a different pattern is called for. Because marriage to Bobbie Wickham is always regarded as a fate to be dreaded, rather like running afoul of one of Bertie Wooster’s aunts.

For the red-haired Bobbie, in spite her extreme beauty, is a sort of benevolent sociopath. She never means to hurt anyone, but she has absolutely no self-control or sense of responsibility, and she generally drops her suitors into some kind of a nightmare situation, like being mistaken for a burglar by a butler with a shotgun, perhaps, or being forced to climb out of a high window with the aid of knotted-together bed sheets. If you find public humiliation hilarious, these are the stories for you.

Mr. Mulliner Speaking is a very funny book. I recommend it. My e-book version featured a number of OCR spelling errors that should have been caught and corrected.

Fiction, Publishing

Now available in paper!

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The wizardry was done over the weekend, and now you can have your own personal copy of The Baldur Game, the final book in the Saga of Erling Skjalgsson, in palpable paperback, to display on your shelves to the admiration of all.

Bookselling, Fiction, Publishing

‘The Baldur Game’: the series ends

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I’d like to think this is a significant day in literary history. It’s certainly significant in my literary history. The Baldur Game, the final volume in my Saga of Erling Skjalgsson, has gone live on Amazon today.

It’s only the ebook at this point — the paperback is ready to go, but I hit a small glitch in getting the cover together. I hope that’ll be straightened out very soon.

An era in my life is finished. These are the books I dreamed of writing as a boy. Whatever I accomplish or fail to accomplish in my little life, I’ll be able to say that I fulfilled that dream. I set my books before the world; let it judge them as it will .

I hope you enjoy it.

Writing

Gunmetal: “I don’t think it means what you think it means…”

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This is sort of the kind of weather I was thinking of, but the fields should be brighter. Photo credit: Raychel Sanner. Unsplash license.

There’s a word (probably there are several, but this is the one I’m aware of at the moment) with which I’ve had a lifelong relationship. A dysfunctional relationship. (But pretty much all my relationships are like that.)

The word is “gunmetal.” And to understand what it means to me, I have to take you back (kicking and screaming, probably) to my childhood (which was an extremely tedious one during the periods when it wasn’t extremely horrific).

I spent a lot of time in my head. I was thinking like a writer, I think, even though I wasn’t actually doing much writing. But I was thinking about words, as well as the things that mattered to me.

One thing that happened in my emotional world was that I fell in love with a certain kind of weather. It’s a summer day, and the sun has been shining brightly. And then a storm blows up on the horizon. So there’s bright sunlight where I am, but a dark, dark backdrop of clouds is looming in the distance. And all of nature – the grass, the golden fields, the trees, are shining with the full brightness of summer in contrast to that dark wall of approaching storm. Like an army of dark trolls advancing on a city of treasure.

Such days filled me with longing and aspiration. They were a promise that life could be bigger, richer, more transcendent. Ordinary life might be tedious and gray and repetitious, but beauty did exist. There it was, right before my eyes, no charge for admission. Even I could dream of higher things.

And when I thought about how I’d write a description of such a day, I hit on the word “Gunmetal.”

Yeah, that was it! Gray like a gun barrel, in contrast to the gold and green of the earth.

Then I looked up the word in a dictionary.

“Gunmetal” does not mean steel gray.

Gunmetal is a type of bronze – an alloy of copper, tin and zinc. It’s gold in color. Sometimes it’s also called “red brass.” They call it gunmetal because naval cannons used to be made of it.

Nothing gray about it at all, except, I suppose, for the smoke.

Well, that made me feel ignorant.

But imagine my amusement when, more than once over my years of reading, I’ve come across a page where some novelist describes a sky as “gunmetal gray.”

So I suppose I could get away with it too, if I wanted to.

But by now it’s kind of a cliché.

If you’re gonna have a cliché, it seems to me it ought to be accurate, at least.

Authors, Bookselling

According to Hoyt

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Sarah A. Hoyt, who blogs at According to Hoyt and who frequents the juggernaut that is Instapundit, was kind enough to include my novel The Year of the Warrior in her final post in her Liberty Book Promo, promoting authors who support freedom. Here’s the link. There are other books there that might interest you too.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Treasure of Tundavala Gap,’ by Jeffrey K. Schmoll

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Author Jeffrey K. Schmoll is a recent acquaintance of mine on X, and I bought his book out of curiosity. The Treasure of Tundavala Gap is not exactly in my usual line, being a story about twenty-somethings and adventure in Africa. Nevertheless, I was increasingly drawn in as I read.

Mateus de Silva is a brilliant physics student working on his doctorate in Texas. He is also the orphaned son of a Cuban exile, and grandson of a well-known Cuban general who was lost fighting in Angola. He has a cocaine habit as well, one which he tells himself he has under control. He also suffers from crippling shyness. His two best friends are his gaming buddies, wealthy Tay and female computer whiz Munie.

When Mateus gets a call to go to Cuba, he’s reluctant to go. He’s informed that his great-grandmother is dying, and she wishes to speak to him. But why should he go? She considers him a bastard and has rebuffed all his previous attempts to make contact.

But she is his only family, so he makes the trip. The woman is fading fast, but makes sure a certain cigar box is placed in his hands. Examining it at home, he is intrigued by a poem included among his grandfather’s letters from Angola to his grandmother. He and his friends put their heads (and computers) together to analyze it, finally realizing it’s a clue to the location of a great treasure.

Soon Mateus and Tay are off to Africa, where they will face crime and corruption, betrayal, romance, and sacrifice. Mateus will discover qualities in himself he never guessed at – and he’ll need them.

The Treasure of Tundavala Gap wasn’t a flawless novel. The author’s prose is adequate – quite good compared to a lot of stuff I’ve read recently – but not memorable. Occasionally he misplaces modifiers, but not too often.

The action is sometimes improbable, but that’s a commonplace in contemporary thrillers. Film tropes show up – the classic bullet wound in the shoulder that’s not all that incapacitating, and when the treasure is found, they feel compelled to examine it by pouring it all out in a visually compelling way rather than just dipping into the sack. But those are small things.

The story was exciting, and filled with twists and turns. The villains were particularly well-done, three-dimensional, and that’s a hard trick for a writer. I was worried for a while that the Cuban Communists looked too romantic, but the author fixed that. I was troubled by the hero’s use of cocaine, even if it diminished as he grew in character. But sequels are promised; perhaps that’s a victory reserved for a future story.

All in all, I recommend The Treasure of Tundavala Gap. A very impressive and exciting first novel.