I recently discovered that the Noah Braddock detective series by Jeff Shelby is still a going concern. So I had a couple books to catch up with. Bail Out comes ahead of the last one I reviewed, in sequence. But that’s not a problem; they stand alone pretty well.
Noah Braddock, San Diego surfer-cum-private eye, needs money to get repairs done on the house on Catalina he inherited from his murdered girlfriend. His massive friend Carter, who is smarter than he looks, says he has a prospective client, but he knows Noah won’t like it.
The prospective client is Darren Van Welker, an old schoolmate who was Noah’s greatest enemy in his youth. Now he’s a successful businessman with a not entirely savory reputation. Darren is getting married (for the third time), and he wants his adult son Aaron to be there, only he’s in Las Vegas and won’t return his father’s calls. He wants Noah and Carter to go to Sin City and drag the young man back.
Noah doesn’t like Darren any more now than he did in the old days, but he takes the job – making it clear that he’s not going to kidnap Aaron if he doesn’t want to go. In Vegas, they get a line on Aaron’s girlfriend. Going to her apartment, they run into a group of not very impressive gangsters, who are looking for her for their boss. Noah and Carter find themselves helping the two young people escape a serious and dangerous problem related to unpaid gambling debts.
The story is essentially pretty fun, almost a comedy. The Noah Braddock books are not comic as a rule, but author Shelby had fun with this one. The gangsters are somewhat laughable, and Carter alone is such a force of nature that nobody ever seems in great danger.
I enjoyed Bail Out immensely. Jeff Shelby is an entertaining storyteller, whether he goes dark or light. Recommended.
She scanned the room and landed on Johnny and just stayed pinned on him, like waiting for the heat from her stare to set his shirt on fire and get his attention.
This one surprised me pleasantly. When I got to reading and realized that Kevin Wade’s Johnny Careless was a story about a middle-class boy moving among the privileged kids of Long Island’s North Shore, I prepared myself for an homage to The Great Gatsby, with maybe a little Marxism mixed in. But it wasn’t like that. Or not mostly like that.
“Jeep” Mullane is the chief of police, the son of a policeman, but the circumstances of his childhood threw him together with the wealthy Johnny Chambliss and his girlfriend (later wife and ex-wife) Niven, so he began to live in two worlds. Johnny had all the irresponsibility of his class, but was aware of it, and kept Jeep close – in part – to ground himself. He could be a jerk, but was always a good friend.
Now Johnny is dead, washed up on the beach with what appear to be contact wounds from a marine engine prop on his body. But what was he doing in the water at that time of night, in that place? Johnny’s powerful father wants it explained, and Jeep wants to understand too.
There’s also pressure from the mayor for the police to stop a string of thefts of high-end automobiles in their supposedly crime-free community.
Jeep will learn – to his shock – that the thefts have a connection to a secret out of the late Johnny’s past.
The writing in Johnny Careless was very good (though author Wade, who’s been a writer for the TV show “Bluebloods,” uses “flaunt” when he means “flout” at one point). An interesting narrative device was employed – the whole story is told from Jeep’s point of view, but events in the present are given in the third person, while flashbacks are in the first person. The characters were interesting and layered. The mystery intrigued me. And it all worked out entirely differently than I expected.
Jeep is an admirable character, though (no surprise here) his morality is not quite Christian as far as sex is concerned. I recommend Johnny Careless, with only the usual cautions.
I was reading Colin Conway’s 509 series, about policing in eastern Washington state, for some time, and enjoying the books. I’m not sure why I lost track of the series – maybe because the books feature revolving main characters and I had trouble keeping track of them. But I need to get back to them. They’re really good. I liked The Fate of Our Years a lot.
Dallas Nash is a detective. He lost his wife a while back, and is mourning hard. He talks to her (when no one’s listening) and avoids music generally, because so many songs remind him of her. But this doesn’t interfere with his work – in fact, he works obsessively, because it’s the only thing that keeps his mind off his grief. Nevertheless, he’s afraid the other cops will learn that he’s seeing a psychologist – it marks you as weak and unreliable.
In The Fate of Our Years, he has to investigate the stabbing death of an old man who was once accused of rape, and the beating death of a homeless man. Neither of these cases are the work of super-criminals. We’re dealing with plain, unromantic police work here, the grinding away until something comes loose.
But the real interest is in the characters. I particularly like it when characters surprise you with unexpected character facets – there are a couple such instances in The Fate of Our Years.
Also, it featured a born-again Christian character who is presented in an entirely positive way. There’s no incentive to do that in today’s publishing world, so I was grateful.
Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware novels are books I enjoy and make a point of reading and reviewing. He also collaborates on novels with his son Jesse. I reviewed one of Jesse’s solo books here before, but didn’t recommend it highly. I thought it was well-written, but morally kind of empty. However, I figured I’d see how he works with his father, so I bought Coyote Hills, book 6 of his Clay Edison series.
Clay Edison used to be an investigator for the Alameda County, California Coroner’s Office. He left that job for reasons which are doubtless explained in earlier installments. Now he’s a private eye, specializing – by preference – in boring desk work.
But there’s another PI named Regina Klein, who prefers more colorful and dangerous work, and she asks Clay to collaborate on a new case. There’s a very wealthy couple whose adult son was found drowned on a beach. The police judged the death accidental, but they are sure he was murdered. Clay uses his police contacts to learn all he can, then goes on to fresh lines of inquiry, including an expensive computer-generated map of coastal currents. But the final truth he uncovers will reveal darker currents yet – the murky ones within the human heart.
I thought (echoing my response to my previous reading of Jesse Kellerman) that Coyote Hills was well-written. The characters were rounded, the dialogue good. Sometimes it was funny.
But I can’t recommend the book to our audience at Brandywine Books. It comes out of another moral world. It’s not only a matter of the casual acceptance of homosexuality, which is pretty much a given nowadays. This book goes deeply into the realm of sexual kink. It made me uncomfortable. You may, of course, respond differently, if you’re more broad-minded than I am.
Also, the authors make it clear that Regina Klein is a very attractive woman, yet Clay’s wife shows no sign of jealousy or concern about their collaboration. I’m the most ignorant man in the world when it comes to marriage issues, but I found this kind of implausible. It read to me like a story from some alternate universe where men and women have slightly different natures.
I have praise but no recommendation for Coyote Hills.
The longer you live, the more buildings you know your way around get torn down, and the more people you used to know get buried. They may be good friends, and you parted in friendship but moved to another state. You may only brush elbows and part ways, and you never see or hear from them again, but you remember them for some odd reason.
A while back I did a web search for a woman I once asked out on a date, decades ago when I lived in Florida (she turned me down). She had died of Covid.
The other day, I recalled a fellow I knew only slightly, in one of the three colleges I attended (I won’t say just which one). I wondered what kind of life he’d lived, because his prospects hadn’t looked good from where I stood.
The main thing I remembered about him was his name. I won’t tell you his surname, but it’s one of those Germanic monikers that basically waves a flag and whistles, inviting mean little boys to make a dirty joke out of it. I pitied him for having such a name hung on him at birth, and always assumed the name probably had a lot to do with his personality. Because he was, to put it mildly, a “difficult” guy. Rebellious against the rules. Touchy. Quick to anger. Vicious with an insult. He wasn’t popular with his classmates at all.
I remember making a conscious choice to be civil to him. To speak to him pleasantly, and with respect. And (at least as I remember it), the last time he spoke with me, he treated me in a civil way also. I took some satisfaction in that. The list of social situations I’ve handled well in my life is, after all, a short one.
Anyway, it turns out he’s dead too, just a few months ago. The obit didn’t say what he died of, but I studied it with interest. He seems to have found a place in the world. A steady, long-time job, family, friends, pets.
The obituary said nothing about a marriage or children, though.
I suppose we were brothers, in a way. He didn’t fit in in one way, I in another.
I hadn’t realized that Jeff Shelby was still putting out Noah Braddock novels. I like these books. Noah, a laid-back California surfer and private eye, mostly works when he feels like it, though he’s growing more responsible. There are shades of Travis McGee here – Noah is less contemplative than the Florida salvage expert, but his character (unlike Trav’s) changes and grows.
I seem to have missed a novel in the series sequence – I’ll have to look for the missing one – but as Caught Inside begins, we find Noah in a not-unfamiliar place. He’s decided to move into the house on Catalina Island that was left to him by Liz, his murdered girlfriend. He’s also reached the point where he wants to ask his longsuffering new girlfriend, Shannon, to move in with him (I suppose it would be too much to hope for marriage). Home ownership means house repairs, and Noah needs to get work to pay for them. His bodybuilder friend Carter has a suggestion… but he won’t like it.
The prospective client is Charisma Lugo, head of a feared female(!) street gang. She doesn’t want him to do anything illegal, she assures him. Her younger brother Xavier, whom she had sent off to a fancy private prep school, has disappeared. She just wants Noah to locate him.
When the boy turns up murdered, she then wants Noah to find out who killed him. (I was never quite clear why he agreed to stay on the job at this point, knowing what Charisma must certainly do to the killers.) Suspects include Xavier’s former friends from the streets, the snooty parents of his WASP girlfriend, and some mysterious tough guys who show up to deliver a good, professional beating. Noah, of course, is not about to be scared off.
Caught Inside was a pretty good novel. Noah Braddock is an ingratiating character. Well worth the price of admission.
The shape of larceny is, in time, written clearly enough on a man’s face so that it can be read. Constant greed and sharp little deals and steals had left the sign on Preston LaFrance. There is the old saying that God and your folks give you the face you’re born with, but you earn the one you die with.
Ah, the joys of settling down with another Travis McGee novel. Even when author John D. MacDonald’s philosophy rings a little tinny, and the predictions have proven wrong in hindsight, Travis himself remains the best of friends – not only highly entertaining but reliable. Pale Gray for Guilt came out in 1968 and is one of the best in the series.
Tush Bannon is one of Travis McGee’s best old friends from his football days. He’s a big, cheerful, uncomplicated fellow, running a small business, raising a nice family. He has everything Trav can never have unless he alters his lifestyle, and Trav knows it. Then somebody decides to take Tush’s business away, and they take his life along with it. Travis is guilty that he wasn’t there to help. So he makes up his mind to get something back for the widow and the kids. And if a bad guy happens to get in the way of justice, he won’t hesitate to extract some blood too.
With the help of his economist friend Meyer, Trav sets up a neat and appealing con. The author of the book had a business degree from Harvard, and this sting, involving inflating a stock and getting out ahead of the pigeon before it crashes, was a little complex, but convincing. Along the way, McGee and Meyer have ample opportunity to look into the Abyss themselves, and glimpse it looking back at them.
Pale Gray for Guilt has the added element, in retrospect, of setting up a poignant plot element that will only bear fruit years later, in the last book of the series, The Lonely Silver Rain.
An outstanding entry in a classic series, Pale Gray for Guilt gets this reader’s highest recommendation. Cautions for adult situations, somewhat racy for the quaint old days of the 1960s.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a book by Andrew Mayne before. I can testify, after reading his novel Mr. Whisper, that he knows how to tell a story. Fascinating premise, engaging characters, well-paced action.
Sloan McPherson, a (female) Florida investigator, tracks down the Marsh Man, a local swamp legend, a sort of Florida Bigfoot. She discovers not a monster, but a confused adult man. It turns out he disappeared as a teenager, many years ago in Oregon, but has no memory of his past life. Where has he been all this time, and how did he get to Florida?
Jessica Blackwood used to be an FBI agent; now she’s a reality TV star on a popular true crime program. Her partner (professional and romantic) is Theo Cray, a brilliant scientist on the high-functioning end of the autism scale. They note that one of this lost boy’s female schoolmates disappeared around the same time, but nobody ever linked the two cases. The two young people had little in common, but they both appear to have been fascinated by the same Jack London novel.
And now a boy in Washington state, who almost committed a mass shooting in his school, presents the same pattern.
If these cases are connected, it means someone has devoted massive resources to some kind of huge, clandestine mind-control experiment. Who could that be? And what will it take to stop them?
I was very impressed with Mr. Whisper. As I said, the book was highly enjoyable and professionally written (though I thought the climax a little forced).
Personally, I had some quibbles. For instance, a historically ignorant dig was taken at the Catholic Church. But what annoyed me most (though mildly) was the ratio of sexes. The main, active characters in this story are mostly female. The action roles which would have gone to men in the Good Old Days are now given to women (though Theo finally gets a chance to show his stuff at the end). I’m inclined to think the author had a movie or miniseries in mind, and was catering to the known preferences of today’s producers.
(If I understand author Mayne’s backlist, he did a previous series starring Theo Cray, though. I probably ought to check that out.)
To sum it up, Mr. Whisper is a very enjoyable, well-written thriller, edging into Sci-Fi. It didn’t make me a fan, but that’s due to my personal prejudices.
Tonight, for no particular reason, Stuart Hamblen’s “This Ole House.” Probably his biggest hit.
This clip comes from the long-running Country & Western comedy show, “Hee-Haw.” I think I actually saw this episode, which surprises me a little, because I wasn’t a regular viewer. I was too snobbish about “hillbilly” music.
As I recall, Hamblen introduced this performance by recounting how he’d come to write it. He was on a hunting trip with a friend in the mountains when they found an abandoned hunting lodge with a man’s body in it (dead, apparently, by natural causes). As they rode back down the mountain, he meditated on mortality and composed the lyrics.
“I hated, Rosemary Clooney’s performance,” he said (as I remember it), “because she speeded it up to a sort of a schottische rhythm. Then it sold a hundred-thousand copies… and I came to love Rosey’s version.”
I was reminded of this song tonight by association. My dad, when he was milking cows out in the barn, used to sing the first couple lines of another of Hamblen’s songs: “I Won’t Go Huntin’ With You, Jake (But I’ll Go Chasin’ Women).” This was a big hit of Hamblen’s before he was born again.
He had a crazy American Christian story. A preacher’s kid, son of the founder of the Evangelical Methodist Church denomination in Texas, he got into music and became a popular singer and recording artist, with his own radio program. He also acted – if you watch old B westerns, you’ll often see Hamblen – not as a hero, but as the bad guy who leads the outlaws or the evil posse. He dealt with the pressures of fame by drinking, and became an alcoholic. Whenever he got arrested for brawling or public intoxication, his radio sponsors would pay his bail and get it covered up.
Then he attended a Billy Graham crusade in Los Angeles in 1949, and surrendered his life to Christ. He stopped doing beer advertisements on his radio show, and got fired for it. But by then he’d given his testimony on the air, and it boosted Billy’s public profile immensely (though Randolph Hearst’s instructions to his editors to “Puff Graham” certainly had plenty to do with it too).
He remained an outspoken Evangelical the rest of his life, composing such songs as “It Is No Secret What God Can Do” (title suggested by his friend John Wayne) and “Open Up Your Heart and Let the Sunshine In.” He also ran for office, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, on the Prohibition ticket.
The main thing I love about “This Old House” is the line, “Now it trembles in the darkness / When the lightning walks about.”
We’re at the dirty end of spring right now. It was cold for a couple days, but we got up near 50 (Fahrenheit) today, and the whole week is supposed to be mild. (Thank Providence, I defrosted my freezer last week.) Most of the snow is gone now; just some crusty edges left – which doesn’t mean we won’t get more snow. We probably will. But that will be short-lived. The ground made visible now is unlovely – dead grass and black dirt. A monochrome, frostbit world.
This week is for me a wild social whirl, which means I had/have two things going on. Or three, if you call a doctor’s visit a social event. That was Monday. I had to see my clinic’s Diabetic Educator. As it says somewhere in Job, “The thing I have greatly feared has come upon me.” (Norman Vincent Peale quotes that repeatedly in his Positive Thinking books.) It actually wasn’t as bad as I feared. The nice lady didn’t put me on a diet. I’ve got some documents I need to get around to reading, but what I took away was mostly that I needed to consume fewer carbs and more fiber. Fiber, apparently, can buffer the carbs in your digestive system, reducing insulin spikes. Good to know.
(Note: I don’t have full-blown diabetes. But I am On the Road. Enough to make lifestyle changes advisable.)
The day before, Sunday, when I was still ignorant of this wisdom, I attended a Swedish Meatball Supper in a church basement. Meatballs for protein, and green beans for fiber to counteract the mashed potatoes. Could be worse. We were fed by Swedes, and it’s always pleasant for a Norwegian to be served by Swedes, after the humiliation of the Outrageous Union of 1814, which we have never yet forgiven.
I was impressed that they served us off china plates. I’ve eaten many a church basement meal, but I think it’s been a decade at least since I last ate in a church basement off anything but paper or Styrofoam. I cannot but salute the diligence of the organizers, who took the extra trouble to wash dishes afterward.
I must also salute my friends, Mark and Renae, who invited me along.
Friday is going to be less pleasant. I’ll be attending the funeral of one the guys from my men’s Bible study. A fine guy who loved the Lord. He used to wear bowties to church, so several of us from the study will be wearing them in his honor. I had to order one from Amazon, but I got next-day delivery, and it’s here now.
Reading notes: The book I’m reading right now (I’ll review it soon; maybe tomorrow) did something that pleased me a lot. A small thing, but it delighted me.
One point I’ve thought about occasionally, over my many years as a reader and writer, was a very trivial issue – the lack of same-name characters in fiction.
This is what I mean – in real life, people with the same first name often show up in the same circles. My Bible study group, for instance, though numbering only eight men on a good night, has two Toms and two Daves in it.
But in fiction, this rarely happens. The reason is obvious, and entirely sensible – it confuses the reader. Unless a plot point requires it, it’s so much easier to just give two characters different names. And since the author is the god of the fictional world, that’s his prerogative.
But in this book, there’s a scene where somebody says, “I was talking to Kate and Kate….” This wasn’t confusing to the reader, because Kate and Kate are throwaway bit characters who never appear again. But the line adds just a half-millimeter of verisimilitude, since we all know that such things happen not infrequently in real life.
That’s a nice literary touch. Wish I’d thought of it.
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