All posts by Lars Walker

Reading, Writing

Author’s notebook: The helpless hero

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Photo credit: Luis Villasmil. Unsplash license.

Yesterday I reviewed a mystery novel by Peter Rowlands. I praised the prose, but thought the plotting and characterization below par. Still, I bought the next book – which I’ll review, I imagine, tomorrow. Tonight I want to comment on something that struck me as I read that second book.

Author Rowlands, as I see it, is still learning the craft of storytelling – as am I, to be honest. One weakness in this book is his overuse of plain luck in order to get the hero out of trouble. On two occasions in this story (so far) his hero has been at the mercy of genuine murderers, but has been saved by the timely appearance of chance passersby.

This is one of the big problems with that species of hero I might call “the helpless hero.” In some ways it’s a great strategy to make your hero an ordinary guy (or gal) with no particular skills or experience with violence. It raises the dramatic tension nicely. The reader identifies with the character and thinks, “What would I do in a situation like that? Could I survive?” (Honest answer: probably not.)

But that’s also the problem. How does he survive? Your James Bonds and Orphan X’s possess training and well-honed instincts for self-defense and survival. But your helpless hero twists in the wind. Rowlands chose to solve that problem, in this book, by resorting to dumb luck twice. My own rule, in reading and writing, is, one dumb luck escape per customer, per story. Any more than that is pushing credibility. Real life offers numerous instances of repeated lucky breaks – and unlucky breaks. But fiction isn’t as strange as truth. You can’t push your reader’s credulity. He paid good money for this book (unless, like me, he takes advantage of free promotional offers).

One work-around that’s become popular – and I’ve commented on it more than once in reviews – is bringing in what I jokingly call “the psycho killer friend.” He doesn’t actually need to be a psycho killer, of course. Probably better if he’s not, come to think of it. But he needs to be physically strong and skilled in fighting. It helps if he’s ruthless too, and condescending about the hero’s moral scruples. At some point in the past, your hero will have pulled a thorn from his paw or something, earning his undying loyalty. This PKF can be on call for  those times when your hero knows he’s going somewhere dangerous. He might even be savvy enough to shadow your hero on his own initiative, when his experience tells him his friend is being foolhardy. A nice twist can be introduced if you remove the PKF’s protection as you’re building up to the final confrontation, forcing your hero to work without a net. (Best not to save your one budgeted lucky break for the climax, though. The effect of that is kind of anticlimactic.)

Another acceptable solution is to have the authorities (usually the police) secretly keeping tabs on your hero, ready to appear, like the US Cavalry, in the nick of time, to the hero’s (and hopefully the reader’s) surprise.

Any other suggestions?

Fiction, Reviews

‘Alternative Outcome,’ by Peter Rowlands

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Sometimes one great virtue in a book, especially if it’s a virtue that’s grown rare and is much missed, will outweigh a few flaws. That’s the case I have to present for Alternative Outcome by Peter Rowlands.

Mike Stanhope, our hero, is an English journalist in the field of transportation and logistics (think trucks and containers). He makes a fair living, but is not fulfilled. For fulfillment, he wrote a mystery novel, which he self-published as an e-book. The book was sparked by a chance encounter in a railway station, when he ran into a woman who reminded him of a girl he’d known as a boy. He met that girl at a coastal resort where his family vacationed, and had a crush on her, but only spoke to her once. He combines this memory with another event that occurred around the time he knew the girl – a big jewelry robbery nearby. One of the robbers was never caught, and it’s rumored that some of the loot was never recovered.

Then someone burgles and searches Mike’s apartment. That’s only the beginning of his troubles, as he realizes that someone has read his book and assumed that his description of the crime is based on actual knowledge – which is not the case. Now wholly engaged, Mike makes a real effort to find the girl he remembers and learn what really happened with he robbery. This will lead him into genuine mortal danger, but also into a new romantic relationship.

I thought Alternative Outcome lagged at times, and some of Mike’s decisions seemed implausibly rash. Nevertheless, this book had one supreme virtue that I prize and rarely see anymore: Author Rowlands, who is in fact a journalist in the transportation and logistics field, can actually spell and write a grammatical, coherent English sentence. I reveled – I luxuriated – in the clean, comprehensible prose. The weaknesses in the story weren’t enough to put me off as long as I had this good writing to enjoy.

Recommended. Cautions for language and sexual situations.

Authors

Snorri’s place

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Tonight, in the absence of any ideas from my corner, here’s a short video from the great Jackson Crawford, filmed at Reykholt, the home of Snorri Sturlusson, the great Icelandic saga author, poet, and chieftain. Crawford explains some things about Snorri’s life. And death. Which happened right there. That pool is geothermally heated, by the way.

Have a good weekend.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Winter Grave,’ by Peter May

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And he wondered how something as full of nothing as emptiness could weigh so heavily.

What do you say about a book that was well-written, one which you enjoyed, when you believe that book to be effectively (if unintentionally) in the service of evil? That’s my problem with Peter May’s A Winter Grave.

Actually it’s not that big a problem. The answer is to tell the truth and let the reader make up his or her own mind.

The year is 2051, and climate catastrophe has struck the earth. The tropics are uninhabitable now, and the loss of the Gulf Stream has turned Scotland into a subarctic wasteland. Addie Sinclair, a weather monitor, climbs a mountain near Loch Leven to check her equipment and discovers the body of a man, frozen in the ice.

Cameron Brodie is a Glasgow police detective. When his superior tells him to go up to the village of Kinlochleven to investigate, he begs off at first. He explains, truthfully, that he’s just been diagnosed with terminal cancer and will be retiring from the force. But when he hears Addie Sinclair’s name he changes his mind, saying it was a false alarm. Because Addie is his own daughter, from whom he has been alienated a long time.

Cam boards an electronic, self-piloting helicopter with a friendly forensic scientist. But when they arrive, murder quickly follows, and Cam is soon fighting for his life in the midst of blizzards, while trying to find a way to explain to his daughter – after all these years – the real cause of her mother’s death.

Peter May is one of the best mystery writers out there, and A Winter Grave showcases all his virtues. The prose is excellent, the characters interesting, the setting vivid, the mystery confounding.

But it’s all in the service of the Green religion. The message of this book, when you get down to it, is, “Wake up! If you don’t surrender all your liberties to the government without delay, so they can implement draconian regulations on every area of your life, future generations will be cursed, and it will be all your fault.” It’s a fascist book, though I’m confident the author is a true believer and intends nothing of the sort.

One thing I found ironic was the book’s depiction of the Green movement as a beleaguered, embattled little cause with diminishing political power, rejected even by the news media.

I can only dream.

Writing

Author’s journal: Holden on to hope

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The current Holden Lutheran Church building. Photo credit: St. Olaf College

I’m pretty sure a one-hour road trip to my home town didn’t used to exhaust me the way it does nowadays. This is partly because I’m ancient and venerable, of course – and I have particular reason to be aware of that just now. But I’m pretty sure it’s also because we didn’t have constant, disruptive highway repair going on in those days. I suppose one must bear in mind that the highways – like the glaciers and the pyramids – were much younger back then. But I also suspect that the Powers That Be just like messing with Gaia-killing auto drivers.

Which is a roundabout way of approaching my story. I drove down to Kenyon, my home town, today. It was the second time I’ve been there in a week, not a common occurrence. A group of my high school classmates and I gather somewhere for lunch every time there’s a fifth Wednesday in any month. Today was that day. We met at a new café in Kenyon, which is remarkable in itself. Kenyon has rarely been capable of supporting more than one restaurant, and sometimes it hasn’t been up to any at all. I wish the folks at Angie’s well. The food was pretty good.

There was really little reason for me to go down today, though, since I saw most of these people on Saturday. (Must be the gypsy in me.) We held a class reunion Saturday, which we do every five years. (And no, I won’t tell you which anniversary it was. No doubt it’s possible to deduce my age through a web search, but I’m not going to hand it to you on a plate.)

We met in a nice little park in Holden, a township north of town. Holden is pioneer country for Kenyon, one of the earliest Norwegian settlements in the area, going back to the 1850s. This was long before my own family moved up from Iowa to settle ignominiously southwest of town, with the newbies. Holden was the home and headquarters of Pastor Bernt Julius Muus, a prominent Norwegian-American pastor and church planter. Muus is best remembered as a main founder of St. Olaf College in Northfield. In his day, however, he was equally notorious for being sued by his wife for divorce – something that just didn’t happen among Lutheran clergy at the time. It became quite a scandal – the poet Bjørnstjerne Bjornsen, on tour in the U.S., interviewed Mrs. Oline Muus and found – to his own surprise, since he hated the Norwegian clergy – that he sympathized with her husband. Prof. Georg Sverdrup of Augsburg College (the subject of a journal I edit), took the wife’s side, seeing Pastor Muus’ behavior as symptomatic of the dictatorial tendencies of too many pastors in church bodies he disagreed with. The radical journalist Marcus Thrane wrote a satirical play about the affair, which was produced in Chicago.

In spite of the fact that I was standing on what had once been enemy territory, from a Georg Sverdrup point of view, I had a good time in Holden Community Park, next door to the church, where they’ve restored an old railroad depot as a shelter.

I’m not sure whether attending reunions is good or bad for the human psyche. It’s a little melancholy to see how much one’s friends have aged (though a moronic but benign natural response assures one that oneself looks better than everybody else). But it’s morally good, I’m convinced, to display oneself before the others, giving them the same reassurance. Also, of course, to renew acquaintances and see what everybody’s been up to. And to learn everybody’s name over again, because I DON’T RECOGNIZE ANY OF THESE RELICS!

I can say for sure that the experience knocked me for a loop psychologically. I’ve been weird for days now, and I fell off my diet. Various explanations for this reaction occur to me, but I’m not sure of any of them.

Nonetheless, I carry on relentlessly with my novel writing. I’ve wrapped up the Baltic Campaign of King Knut’s war against St. Olaf (the man, not the school). Now I must build up, with tragic inevitability to… well, you’ll know when you read the book. I’ve been experimenting with some limited multiple viewpoint narrative in this work, and that’s where I’ll be going now. I’ll need to pause at least one day in laying down words, to organize my research.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bloodshot,’ by Mac Fortner

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I gave a mixed review to Knee Deep, Mac Fortner’s first Cam Derringer book, yesterday. I thought I’d give the series one more chance, so I bought Book 2, Bloodshot. My mind is made up now.

Cam Derringer, our hero, big, handsome and irresistible to women, has left Key West temporarily to spend a year in New York City (where he apparently had no trouble obtaining a concealed carry gun permit). The deal is that if he works at his friend Chad’s law practice for a year, he can get his own law license reinstated. Then he figures he’ll go back to the Key. As another inducement, his girlfriend Robin, an FBI agent, has also been assigned to New York.

He’s pleased when Chad announces his engagement to a beautiful heiress, but less happy when he learns that the woman’s father has a questionable legal record. Then a sniper starts shooting and wounding members of the fiancée’s family and circle, and Cam and Robin find themselves facing a dangerous, skilled opponent with an astonishing agenda.

It gradually dawned on me as I read Bloodshot that these books are – from my perspective –   creepy in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. There’s Cam’s ambivalent relationship with his beautiful adult “daughter,” whom he raised but who is clearly in love with him. Then there’s one of the major characters, whom we’re apparently supposed to see as spontaneous and charming, but whom I found psychopathic.

There was also a lot of sex – not explicit, but the author sure kept some of his characters naked a lot of the time.

There were also logical oddities here. Our hero gets shot, in the traditional style, with a .45 caliber slug to the shoulder. This requires (of course) nothing more than in the way of treatment than a sling for his arm, and he’s soon using the arm again. His police detective friend smokes a cigar in his office and drinks on the job (I’m pretty sure that doesn’t fly in today’s NYPD).

More essentially, the writing was weak, with a fair number of mistaken word choices. I thought the plot here was less disjointed than in Knee Deep, but it was still complicated and improbable. The plot resolution failed to satisfy me from a moral perspective (perhaps I’m a legalist).

Personally, I’m done with Cam Derringer.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Knee Deep,’ by Mac Fortner

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I went through three phases in my reading of Mac Fortner’s novel, Knee Deep. At first, when I discovered that the detective hero Cam Derringer lives on a houseboat in Key West, I had a pleasurable moment of imagining there’d be some Travis McGee pleasures in the mix. In this I was disappointed. Then I was less disappointed, but also less than enamored.

Cam Derringer used to be a lawyer. Then he lost his license, and his home. And then his wife disappeared aboard her boat. He suspects she fell victim to boat-jackers, and has devoted his life ever since to discovering her fate, eking out his living through private investigating.

When a woman hires him to look for her missing husband, Cam finds himself once again on the trail of the boat-jacking gang. Along the way he meets a beautiful, mysterious woman who may herself be part of the gang, which is awkward because he’s falling in love with her. It becomes increasingly difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys as a massive terrorist plot hurtles toward its consummation.

Cam Derringer is, as it turns out, nothing like Travis McGee. Which isn’t a sin – there’s more than one good kind of detective. Sadly, Cam isn’t any of those. In contrast to the McGee novels, this book departs from first person narration now and then to show us what the bad guys are doing. Which doesn’t make our hero look particularly smart. In fact, he’s generally a few steps behind them, and his own guesses and actions aren’t very successful. He isn’t even the rescuer at the climax, which employs a rather cumbersome and improbable technical trick.

Author Fortner’s plot is kind of loose and meandering, as well as complicated to follow. The writing is fair – I’ve seen worse, but I wouldn’t call it tight prose. The dialogue lacked tension, I thought. There was a fair amount of sex – not explicit, but Cam turns out to be the kind of detective beautiful women keep throwing themselves at, which can get annoying. For me. OK, I’m jealous.

Still, I bought the next volume in the series. I can’t have disliked it that much. I can state that Knee Deep was sometimes an amusing read.

Writing

Author’s journal: The Battle of Holy River

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Statue of St. Olaf on Nidaros Cathedral, Trondheim.

Tonight you’ll get a bit of authorial journaling, since nothing better occurred to me. The other day I topped 40,000 words on my work in progress, The Baldur Game. I’m adapting saga material here (whether historically factual or not), and I don’t think I can do much harm describing some of the challenges involved.

The Battle of Helgeå (Holy River) happened some time in the period from 1025-1027 AD. Snorri Sturlusson, in Heimskringla (the sagas of the Norwegian kings) seems to place it in 1026. I actually spent some time analyzing the chronology and decided to use the same year – mostly because it fitted my plot. But I think it’s a good guess. We know King Knut the Great was in Rome for Conrad II’s coronation as Holy Roman emperor the following year.

The battle itself seems to have actually happened (contemporary chroniclers mention it), but the details are sparse and debatable. Snorri tells an elaborate tale about a sophisticated stratagem Olaf used to trick Knut (and Erling too, of course, since he was in Knut’s fleet), but the actual practical effects seem minimal, even in Snorri’s account. It’s treated as a great victory for Olaf, but in fact it only bought him a chance to escape – ultimately without his ships, which he left in the Baltic (Denmark, as I keep reminding people, controlled the Baltic outlets, the source of its power), going back to Norway overland and wearing his shoes out.

I’m not going to detail Olaf’s clever battle stratagem here. Wouldn’t want to spoil it for you; you can just wait for the novel. (Or read Heimskringla.) It doesn’t really work with the physical features of the topography at the mouth of the real Helgeå, which is one reason scholars have proposed alternate locations.

I’ve decided to stay with the traditional battle site, in eastern Skåne (part of Sweden today but Danish at the time). I’ll have to contrive some kind of fantasy device to epic-afy the whole business, but I intended to do that anyway. So far this first draft is a little light on the fantasy element, and my readers expect some mermaids and monsters. (I have to keep reminding myself that this is not a problem. I always tell aspiring writers that they need to remember that a first draft is just raw material. Doesn’t have to be perfect. Doesn’t even have to be good. It’s what you start with. Somebody (I don’t recall who) said, “Stories aren’t written – they’re re-written.” The revision process is as important as the first draft – maybe more important. It depends, I suppose, on what kind of a writer you are.)

I’m still less than half-way through writing this draft, but I’m OK with that. This is meant to be my big book. My epic. My War and Peace, or Atlas Shrugged, or something. I’ve begun work and I’m making steady progress. I possess few virtues, but finishing projects is something I do seem to be able to do.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘In Forkbeard’s Wake,’ by Ben Nimmo

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Our friend Dan Nelson, in a comment, mentioned a book about sailing in King Svein Forkbeard’s wake, and I was reminded that I owned the book and ought to consult it on my current project. It’s a 2003 release called In Forkbeard’s Wake, by Ben Nimmo. I remembered it as a good book, and my review confirms that judgment.

Ben Nimmo is (or was, according to his bio) a British scuba instructor. He had written one previous book and – as far as I can tell – that’s the end of his output. That is a great pity – he’s an engaging writer. An internet search suggests that nowadays he’s involved in combatting online “disinformation.”

I can’t claim that I re-read In Forkbeard’s Wake in full – I only reviewed the parts dealing with the places I’m writing about in this book – Sweden and Denmark. Information on sailing conditions was especially useful to me.

But as a bonus, the book’s general pleasures were notable. Nimmo excels at describing landscape and weather. He relates well to the people he meets, who – except for government functionaries (occasionally) – are almost always friendly, interested, and accommodating. A sailing voyage, even in our day of satellite navigation, remains a risky project, especially when you’re sailing solo in a small boat. So there are some genuine thrills here too.

Ben Nimmo is a fine writer. I appreciated his wit, as in passages like this: “I’d also been warned that Danes have a real problem welcoming strangers; this, coming from a Norwegian, was a fine case of the pot calling the Ketill black.”

Anyway, In Forkbeard’s Wake is a first-rate sailing book, and I recommend it. Not available, alas, in electronic form.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Return Fire,’ by Tom Barber

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Tom Barber, author of Return Fire (part of the Sam Archer thriller series) is apparently a very young man. So I suppose I should cut him some slack in criticizing his prose. He seems to have been pretty successful as a novelist (which I certainly can’t claim), so he must be doing something right.

Return Fire, which I got through a free offer, is another example of the genre I call… what do I call it? I forget. Tonight I’ll call it Movie Thrillers in Print. The idea is to give readers the same irrational thrill they get from a John Wick kind of movie. The story won’t stand up to much logical analysis, but there will be thrills galore.

Sam Archer, our hero, is a former London policeman who moved to America (he has dual citizenship) to join the FBI, then joined an antiterrorist unit in the New York City Police Department. He is engaged to Alice Vargas, a member of the same squad (how did they work that?), but she went on vacation to Spain after a lover’s quarrel. Now she’s been kidnapped, and evidence suggests she’s being held in London. Sam and several of his friends from work are assigned to fly to London and assist in the investigation (we’re supposed to believe a cop would be allowed to work a case involving his fiancée). But little do they know they’re all being maneuvered into a kill zone by a vengeful master criminal.

Plausibility is not a high priority here. As in action movies, our hero and his friends suffer incredible physical punishment (including one guy being technically dead for a couple minutes) and just keep on fighting. About a ton of lead gets expended through firearms, both Glocks (all handguns are Glocks) and automatic weapons, but somehow only peripheral characters get killed, at least at first. Cars get shot to pieces before – eventually – somebody thinks of shooting out a tire to stop one. A pistol shot is used to open a padlock (safety tip: you can’t generally do that).

Aside from logic problems, the prose was weak. The author has a university degree in English and should know not to misplace his modifiers. Example: “Dressed in tracksuit bottoms and a sweat-stained t-shirt, blood was spattered on a white wall.” (You’ll note that the sentence is telling us how the blood was dressed.) There are awkward lines like, “Before long, what had been lying just under the surface between them had quickly caught fire.”

And finally, the author has an annoying tick of not knowing when to quit. He likes to close chapters with a zinger, which often doesn’t zing but just weakens the previous line with a redundancy. For instance, he says of the kidnap victim, who has spent a terrifying day in brutal captivity:

She’d never been to London before and so far the jury was out on whether she’d ever want to come back.

Today hadn’t exactly been the most pleasant of welcomes.

Now re-read that passage without the last line. Works better, doesn’t it?

However, I did finish Return Fire, so I can’t claim it wasn’t readable. Author Barber is young enough that he might possibly someday refine his craft.