Good news. Translation work has shown up. I dare not hope it means the drought is over; it’s the same project that I worked on a month ago. But we live in hope. So what shall I write about tonight, children, in haste as I am?
As I told you, I’ve been watching a lot of old black and white mysteries. I find myself – to my surprise – somewhat fascinated by the Charlie Chan series. It has its objectionable sides – most particularly in its racial portrayals (though Mantan Moreland was a genius). And sometimes they’re pure B-movie cheese. But occasionally they display some qualities of style and intelligence.
But the film that particularly fascinated me was a 1929 release called Behind That Curtain (based on a novel of the same name by Earl Derr Biggers, though it seems to deviate heavily from that source). The movie is memorable for two or three reasons. The main one is that it’s – technically – the very first Charlie Chan movie. But it’s an awkward fit with the rest of the series.
The thing is, the movie as it turned out isn’t really a Charlie Chan story. He’s mentioned near the beginning, and he shows up near the end, as a secondary character. In this story, he appears more similar to the real Honolulu policeman Chang Apana, whom Biggers credited as the inspiration for the character. (Though the wiry Apana was a far more hardboiled guy than the portly, cerebral Chan of the movies. He was known for using a bullwhip.) In this movie, Chan is a tough cop, a tad trigger happy. No apparent mastermind. He’s played by a roundish Korean actor named E. L. Park.
The story of the film involves a young English woman, Eve Mannering (Lois Moran) who defies her loving guardian to marry the shady Eric Durand. They move to India, where Eric turns out to be a feckless, unfaithful rotter. Eventually the English detective Sir Frederick Bruce shows up to interrogate Eric over an old crime, and Eve, having learned enough about her husband, flees to Honolulu (San Francisco? I forget). There Eric locates her at last, and there’s a decisive showdown at a lecture being given by Eve’s true love, the explorer Col. John Beetham (Warner Baxter).
Aside from the early, clean-shaven and actually Asian Charlie Chan we encounter in this movie, there are other points of interest. One is Col. Beetham’s taciturn Indian servant, who is played by a young Boris Karloff.
The other notable aspect, more literary, is the actress Lois Moran, who plays Eve. She was very pretty, even to modern eyes, and is remembered in real life for being the mistress of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who based the character of Rosemary Hoyt in Tender Is the Night on her.
That’s a lot of freight for one B movie to carry. The film itself is so-so. Standard early sound stuff, where everything moves really slowly, and everybody overacts.
“My point is, it’s clear to me that any great artist—musician, painter, sculptor, a fine prose stylist—is on a subconscious level a mathematician and a mason and an engineer…. An artist is a mathematician who knows the formulas of the soul. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’”
I’ve become a great fan of Dean Koontz’s work, but my enthusiasm is not bestowed equally on all the branches of his work. I’m not a fan of horror, and his latest book, The House at the End of the World, is pretty intense horror.
Katie (I’m pretty sure we’re told her last name at some point, but I can’t find it) is an artist. A few years back, following the horrendous deaths, due to crime, of her two daughters and her husband, she withdrew to the island called Jacob’s Ladder. (One assumes it’s on one of the Great Lakes, but that’s not specified.) Here she paints, but not to her own satisfaction. She knows she has enemies who might decide to dispose of her at any time, so she found herself a solid, fortified house and keeps well armed. She has no social contacts. She promised her husband she’d go on living, so that’s what she’s doing, but without happiness.
Then strange things start happening. Odd sounds in the night; an unidentifiable animal pattering across her roof. There’s unusual activity too at Ringrock, a nearby island that houses a government facility. It’s supposed to be something to do with the EPA, but it’s too hush-hush for that. When a couple armed federal agents show up on her island and arrogantly order her around, she bridles. Then a vicious storm comes up and one of the agents reappears, seemingly insane. Katie begins considering leaving the island, but the agents have disabled her boat.
Then a young girl shows up from another neighboring island. She has a horrific story to tell. Her parents, who worked at Ringrock, are dead, and her nurse has been murdered by a monster. Together they will face the challenge of fighting whatever unearthly creature has taken up residence in Katie’s basement, and then take a dangerous boat trip ashore, after which they’ll have to face both aliens and their own government.
Aside from my distaste for horror stories, I also thought The House at the End of the World started rather slowly. A lot of time is spent with Katie alone, establishing her character and back story without a whole lot happening. Once the girl, Libby, shows up, things move faster. The book is exciting, and if you go for bug-eyed monsters, there’s a pretty spooky one here. Then the government proves to be worse (a sign of the times).
Cautions for language. The author has chosen to use a lot of obscene language in this book, even out of the mouth of the teenaged girl.
The House at the End of the World isn’t a bad novel, but it didn’t suit me as a lot of Dean Koontz books do.
Shoveled snow today, because my neighbors who usually blow the stuff away are still on vacation. Nevertheless, I am unbowed. I’m reading Dean Koontz’ latest right now, so there’s no review. But it’s Friday, and that’s often a day for posting music.
Our beloved Sissel was just 15 when she sang this song on Norwegian TV. It’s a translation of a French number called ‘Hymne a l’amour,’ made popular by Edith Piaf. There is an English version, entitled, ‘If You Love Me,’ and it’s very good, but the video isn’t a live performance. So we’ll use this one. You can find the other on YouTube if you like.
Now and then the major had to sideline the jeep as a column of Shermans ground along the road, pulling up a coughing fit’s worth of dust as well as releasing spumes of octane consumption and more noise than could be easily borne. They sounded like radiators clattering down a marble staircase.
If you’re my friend on Facebook, you may have noticed a couple “woe is me” posts from me in the last couple days. Those posts have provoked a couple very nice comments on my books, which I appreciate a lot.
But when I read a Stephen Hunter novel, I feel myself larval and unformed. This guy knows how to tell a story.
The Bullet Garden is his latest, and it’s an Earl Swagger book, about the father of Hunter’s regular hero. It’s been a while since he did an Earl Swagger book, and I remember thinking, when I read the last one, that there were signs he might enjoy those stories even more than the Bob Lee ones.
In the somewhat flexible chronology of Earl Swagger’s life, this book comes after his adventures on Tarawa in the South Pacific. In the European theater, the D-Day invasion has occurred, but the advancing Allies are bogged down in the “bocage,” the famous hedgerows of Normandy. One of their worst headaches is a company of ranging enemy snipers who consistently attack American patrols, picking off their officers just at sunrise or sunset, when most men can’t see well, and leaving the troops in panic.
Allied command wants the best sniper in the American military to come and figure out a way to kill these killers. So the summons goes to Sgt. Earl Swagger of the US Marines, who’s training leathernecks at Parris Island just now. The assignment goes with a brevet rank of Major in the US Army (!). Earl agrees to go – it could be interesting.
The story will take us to SHAEF headquarters in London – hopelessly politicized and riddled with spies. We meet Earl’s chief assistant, Lt. Leets (a character from a previous story, and, even better, a Minnesotan!), and Basil St. Florian, hero of Basil’s War. There’s Leets’ gorgeous sweetheart, a secretary at SHAEF, who has to deal with unwanted advances from a corrupt officer. There’s Archer and Goldberg, a couple hapless dogface draftees who turn into unlikely heroes. And there’s also the mysterious sniper, a man with a strange history and stranger motives.
You’ll encounter a lot of name-dropping in this book, especially of the literary kind. Very few names are given, but they’re all easily recognizable; some are delightful surprises. The villain of the story (the physical villain; there’s a strategic villain too) is disguised by a minor name change, but should be fairly easy to identify, at least at one remove (contact me if you have trouble).
But it’s the sheer, masterful storytelling that amazed me. The plot is complex, but as smoothly and efficiently assembled as the lock of a custom hunting rifle. I cared about the characters and my interest never flagged for a moment.
I have only a few quibbles, which seem to be editing problems. The author loses track of a female character’s hair color at one point, and seems to get confused about the mechanics of driving on the left side of the road at another.
But all in all, The Bullet Garden is a tour de force of thriller writing. Highly recommended. Cautions for language and adult topics.
Stephen Hunter has a new book out, and I’ve got it. It is, needless to say, a sheer delight to read. At the rate I’m going, I’ll probably have a review tomorrow. So, in anticipation, I post the short interview above, which is pretty old. But most of the interviews I found with him were heavy on gun topics. I have no objection to gun topics myself, being a gun nut too. But I thought, in this space, I wanted to find something focused a little more on storytelling, because, however much an expert Hunter may be on gun topics, he’s even more knowledgeable about plotting and characterization. I think this interview, from 2010, advertising his novel I, Sniper, showcases that. To an extent.
The interviewer refers to the roman à clef nature of the novel’s beginning. Most of you are probably familiar with the term, and it’s explained as they talk.
Advice to writer’s: If you’re going to write a roman à clef, aim high. Portray famous people – political figures and celebrities. Do not write a roman à clef in which you show that guy you hated in high school dealing drugs or visiting brothels, unless you’ve disguised him beyond all recognition. If he can guess who he is in the book, he can sue you. Public figures can’t do that; they’re pretty much fair game, according to law.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel from New Zealand before. The setting in Dead Ground by Justin Warren is kind of exotic. My main takeaway is that it seems to rain a lot on the west coast.
Dylan Harper is a young police detective in Christchurch. He and his older partner are surprised when they’re sent over to Westport on the west coast, to investigate the disappearance of a newspaper reporter who also worked a second job as an environmental inspector. Dylan isn’t keen to go, because Westport was his childhood home, and he has bad memories from the place. Not to mention enemies.
When they arrive, they quickly suspect the missing man’s attractive wife of murdering him. But as they poke around, questions arise about his last known movements, and about water samples he took at a remote farm. Dylan begins to suspect dirty work at a Chinese-owned mining operation in the mountains.
Now, whenever people talk about mining in a mystery these days, you can be pretty certain contamination and some kind of cover-up can’t be far behind. And when the Chinese are involved, that pretty much seals the deal. The real mystery here is who has been corrupted and how high the corruption goes.
The writing in Dead Ground is okay, but nothing to crow about. Author Warren does make some effort to provide colorful descriptive passages for the reader. The major weakness in the writing, from my point of view, was homophone confusion.
What I liked least was that the book ended in a cliffhanger.
There are further books in the series, if this one grabs you.
It’s one of my many moral weaknesses. Whenever I come across a Florida mystery about a detective who lives on a boat, something in my brain says, “Maybe this will be the next Travis McGee.” It never is, and the disappointment skews my critical judgment. And yet I can’t help myself.
The latest self-inflicted wound of this sort is Million Dollar Staircase, by David Crosby. It’s the first in a series starring Will Harper, a retired journalist who inherited money and chose to live aboard a houseboat in a marina in the Tampa Bay area. He’s been enjoying the maritime lifestyle and growing closer to Sandy, a beautiful French woman who runs another marina nearby. One day he finds Sandy in a celebratory mood. She just read that the town is planning to develop a river walk around her property. That will certainly bring business in!
Only it won’t. Turns out the city plans to condemn her property, and that of her neighbors, paying only current market value – though once the development begins, values will skyrocket. It also turns out a local real estate investor has bought out all the homes in the area, at depressed prices. The whole busines stinks of cronyism and corruption.
But Will has a lawyer friend who owes him a favor. He’ll sue the city for them pro bono. There’s a good chance that, if they can’t get the eminent domain process stopped, they’ll at least be able to get the business owners a more reasonable payout.
What they don’t expect is that some people are willing to kill to cover up their corruption.
Million Dollar Staircase wasn’t a bad book. I liked Will Harper and his friends, and was rooting for them. I am entirely sympathetic to those who oppose the way Eminent Domain has been abused in recent decades.
But I thought the story a little… slack. The suspense could have been ramped up more effectively, and I would have liked for Will Harper to be a little more of a fighter (in the physical sense).
But it wasn’t bad. I don’t remember much objectionable language, and the sex scenes weren’t very explicit. I downloaded a three-book package, so I’ll see how I like the next books.
Sometimes I read a book and I think, “This writer is following a formula.” Following a formula can even work, depending on how the writer fills in the blanks.
One Wilde Night by Patrick Logan works, but only on a technical level.
Tommy Wilde, our hero, has a PhD in biochemistry, but ended up running a crime scene clean-up business. He works mostly at night. He’s training a new employee one night when he gets a call for help from his loser brother Brian, a drug addict. Tommy runs to meet him – at their church – where Brian is panicking over the body of a drug dealer. The dealer – Brian says – just dropped dead. Not his fault.
Due to an overwhelming sense of obligation, Tommy helps Brian dispose of the body, while eluding the drug dealer’s associates. Or so he thinks. In fact, this is just the beginning of a long, long night in which Tommy will be beaten up, kidnapped, threatened and physically mutilated.
There’s a template for writing a thriller. Start by putting your character in a bad situation, then make it steadily worse. Turn every step forward into two steps back.
Author Logan dutifully follows this template. The problem is that at some point, if you raise the stakes enough, you start losing credibility. Everybody has bad nights, but nobody’s nights go that bad in this many ways. This is the sort of story logic you find in a thriller movie, but in a book the audience has more time to reflect and ask themselves, “Do I believe this?”
Even worse, One Wilde Night never really resolves any of Tommy’s problems. It ends in a cliff-hanger. In other words, what we have here isn’t even a whole story. It’s just the first chapter of a story.
And sure enough, there’s a whole series of Tommy Wilde stories to follow.
But I ain’t reading them.
I should note that the church and their priest come out looking good here, so the author at least seems friendly to Christianity. However, he also drops a whole lot of f-bombs.
Well, that was an experience. I went ahead and followed my instinct to download George du Maurier’s novel Trilby, based on my weird fascination with the old John Barrymore movie, “Svengali.” I wasn’t prepared for the degree to which the book would grab me. It was one of those “hard to put it down” reading experiences.
My shame is great at being taken in like this by a Victorian bestseller, and not even a mystery or an adventure tale! A love melodrama, of all things.
Most oddly of all, though Trilby fascinated me, I can’t really recommend it to our readers. I have several objections to the thing.
As you may (or may not) be aware, Trilby is a story mostly about the lives of artists in Paris’ Latin Quarter in the 1850s. This novel’s extreme popularity established that time and place forever in the public mind as a colorful, freethinking milieu. Three British painters – the big war veteran Taffy, the jolly Laird, and the young, innocent Little Billee, share an atelier. There they meet a charming young woman, Trilby O’Ferrall, who is of Irish/Scottish parentage but has spent all her life in Paris. She works as an artist’s model and a washer woman. She’s beautiful, unaffected, uninhibited, and charming. They all fall in love with her to some extent, but Little Billee does most of all. However, he can’t handle the fact that she does nude modeling (“for the altogether,” as she puts it. This is where our phrase “in the altogether” originates), and is not chaste. In spite of his religious freethinking (much is made of that), he’s basically an upper middle-class boy.
Another member of their circle, though generally unwelcome, is Svengali, a Polish Jew and a brilliant musician. Svengali can play any instrument beautifully, except for his own voice. When he hears Trilby’s voice, he’s intrigued, but he soon learns that, though the sound itself is magnificent, she is utterly tone-deaf.
Eventually Billee overcomes his scruples and proposes marriage to Trilby. She agrees reluctantly. Although she reciprocates his love, she understands their social differences would doom their marriage. Soon after, Billee’s mother and sister come to visit, and his mother has a talk with Trilby, who agrees to break the engagement and disappears. Billee then suffers a breakdown which marks the end of his time in Paris. But his talent has now been recognized, and when he recovers, back in England, he is a famous and sought-after man.
Five years later, he, Taffy, and the Laird have a reunion in Paris. They’re surprised to learn that their old acquaintance Svengali is now the talk of Europe. He is famous as the manager of his beautiful wife, “la Svengali,” said to have the most ravishing voice in the world. The trio get tickets to her concert, and are almost – not quite – certain that la Svengali is in fact their old friend Trilby, whom they’d thought dead. When by chance they encounter the Svengali carriage on the street, both their old acquaintances pretend not to know them.
From there it all rolls on to a tragic conclusion, more drawn-out than in the film.
I said, in discussing the movie, that the cinematic Trilby reminds me of a girl I once cared about. It disturbed me, as I read, that Trilby in the book was even more like the girl I knew than the actress (though my girl did not share Trilby’s sexual mores). On top of that, elements in the story took me back to my college days. I think it was a feeling that, in some ways, I was reading about my own life that gripped me as I read Trilby.
But you, Kind Reader, never knew that girl. And you (probably) weren’t there when I was in college. So I have no reason to think you’d react to this book as I did.
For one thing, it’s Victorian literature – that is to say, overwritten. Du Maurier isn’t a horrible over-writer like so many Victorians; often he can be amusing in his frequent digressions. (By the way, there’s a lot of French dialogue in this book, so it helps if you have decent French. Which I don’t). But he does take his time telling the story. This isn’t just a narrative; it’s sort of a leisurely travelogue.
But my main objections are moral and theological. This was a somewhat scandalous book in its time – “Read about all the naughty things they get up to in Paris!” Trilby isn’t a virgin for much the same reason that a girl in the South Sea islands wouldn’t be a virgin. It’s alien to her culture. Du Maurier may have been challenging Victorian sexual mores here, but he keeps it oblique.
Much worse is the antisemitism. A lot has been written over the years about Svengali as a Jewish stereotype. Which he certainly is. He’s arrogant, selfish, grasping, and filthy (an odd accusation to make against any Jew, when you think about it). The passages concerning Svengali are frankly horrifying. However, fortunately, Svengali isn’t in the book as much as in the movie.
It should also be noted that there are several Jewish characters in Trilby, and the others are rather nice.
Even worse, from my perspective, are the theological digressions. The author takes several opportunities to have his characters contemplate – or discover – the complete absurdity of Christian doctrine. Everyone who thinks about it (in this book) soon agrees that the Judeo-Christian God is ridiculous and there is no Hell to fear. Either everyone is saved or everyone just goes to sleep. Nothing to worry about, as long as you do good.
So I don’t really know what to tell you about Trilby. It might fascinate you as it fascinated me. Very likely it won’t. If you do read it, you’ll have to wade through some nasty spots, but there are also many rewards.
