All posts by Lars Walker

Fiction, Reviews

‘Key Lime Blues,’ by Mike Jastrzebski

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First, a quibble. Although the cover blurb says Key Lime Blues is a “Wes Darling sailing mystery thriller,” the story really has little to do with sailing, though there is a little boat business along the way. The hero lives on a sailboat called the Rough Draft, which is the name, we’re informed on the Amazon page, of the author’s boat. But that’s a name that’s really only appropriate for a writer’s boat, not a private eye’s.

Wes Darling is a bartender in Key West, Florida. He fled to the Keys after quitting his job with the successful detective agency run by his mother. A bad case which ended in the death of a young girl left him traumatized, and he wants nothing more to do with investigations.

But then one of his mother’s operatives, an older man who was her boyfriend and Wes’ father figure, shows up shot to death on a nearby beach. Wes can’t refuse his mother’s request that he look into it, but he’s adamant he’s not coming back to the firm.

He discovers that the victim was in town looking for a client’s girlfriend, with whom he says he wants to reconcile. Only that’s a lie. The girlfriend is a six-foot, drop-dead gorgeous stripper called Destiny, and the client is a gangster who wants the diamonds Destiny stole from him. He’s also got a couple low-intelligence, twin-brother thugs in town searching for her, and Wes will divide his time between trying to protect Destiny from them, and trying to get the truth from Destiny. Much blood will be spilled – some of it Wes’ – before he solves the case.

In the wake of the last book I reviewed, also set in the Keys, I appreciated the lighter tone of Key Lime Blues. I think the intention was to write a humorous mystery (lots of yuks are gotten out of Wes Darling’s last name), but I didn’t find it all that funny.

And the plot didn’t make a lot of sense to me. This is one of those stories where most of the trouble could have been avoided if the hero had just leveled with the police in the first place. It’s explained that Wes doesn’t trust cops because of bad memories from his tragic case, but it’s still stupid behavior, and that diminishes my empathy.

The main villain is supposed to be a super-genius, but doesn’t seem that brilliant, just repeating unsuccessful tactics over and over, hoping they’ll work better this time.

Also, Wes suffers multiple head traumas, and in the honored (and unrealistic) tradition of hard-boiled private eyes, is back in action an hour later. In addition, the fight scenes weren’t very well written.

There was also a psychic who appeared legitimate, which I consider cheating in a mystery.

And finally, the ultimate resolution was morally unsatisfying to me.

So I didn’t really like Key Lime Blues very much. I don’t think I’ll continue with the series.

Authors, Uncategorized

Vulgar Swedish dwarfs

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An illustration by Gustaf Tenggren for “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” (1923)

I think it says a lot about my tremendous personal modesty that, on the rare occasions when I learn something I didn’t know about Scandinavian history and culture, I share it here in public, in front of our FBI surveillance team and everybody, instead of concealing it. And I did learn something new today, in the August issue of the Sons of Norway’s Viking Magazine.

Even better, there’s an Inkling connection. An adversarial connection, but a connection nonetheless.

C. S. Lewis wrote, in Surprised by Joy:, Chapter III

I fell deeply under the spell of Dwarfs—the old bright-hooded, snowy-bearded dwarfs we had in those days before Arthur Rackham sublimed, or Walt Disney vulgarized, the earthmen.

He wrote, further, in a 1939 letter to his friend A. K. Hamilton Jenkin, “Dwarfs ought to be ugly of course, but not in that way. And the dwarfs’ jazz party was pretty bad.”

Tolkien, it is reliably reported, rebuffed offers from Disney for film rights to the Lord of the Rings, based on similar feelings.

According to “The Art of Trolls,” an article by Rowdy Geirsson in the August Viking Magazine, the fault for this “vulgarization” of dwarfs lies solidly on the head of a Swedish artist, Gustaf Tenggren (1896-1970). Tenggren made his name as an artist in his native Sweden, becoming known for illustrations of fantastical subjects, becoming the featured artist for “Bland tomter och troll,” an annual publication devoted to fairy stories. In 1936 he went to work for Disney Studios, becoming their chief conceptual artist. It was in this capacity that he designed the characters for “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” as well as later productions like “Pinocchio,” “Fantasia” and “Bambi.”

Judging by his Swedish work (an example is posted above), I would guess that Lewis would have been equally displeased by Tenggren’s earlier dwarfs, considering them “sublimed” in the Rackham style. (Though Arthur Rackham was an artist whose Wagnerian work he cherished.)

There’s something in Lewis’ and Tolkien’s criticism, of course, and it’s grown more apparent with the years. Animation is subject to fashions over time. I believe I read somewhere that when “Snow White” first came out, critics admired Disney’s dwarfs but found the “human” characters rather bland. Today the human characters look far better than the dwarfs, who possess a rubbery quality that’s gone out of style. (I personally particularly dislike the works of Fleischer Studios. Except for Popeye. I likes me Popeye.)

It’s a rule that we Norwegians have understood for many centuries – you can never go wrong blaming the Swedes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Tropical Freeze,’ by James W. Hall

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It was only after I’d purchased James W. Hall’s Tropical Freeze (got a deal on it) that I realized I’d already read the first book in this series (originally published in the late ‘80s), and didn’t much care for it. But having it at hand, I figured I’d give the series a second shot. Results: ambivalent.

Thorn (his only name) is a beach bum in Key Largo, Florida. He occupies his time making fishing lures and rebuilding his house, which got blown up in the last book. He gets a job offer from his friend Gaeton, who used to be an FBI agent. Now he works for Benny Cousins, another ex-FBI agent who runs a private security form. There’s a place there for Thorn, Gaeton says, if he wants it. Good money.

Thorn doesn’t want it. In fact, he takes an instant, intense dislike to Benny.

Then Gaeton disappears off the face of the earth. And Thorn falls for Darcy, Gaeton’s sister, who’s a weather girl in Miami. Darcy, in turn, is being stalked by a dim-bulb local bartender with delusions of Nashville stardom. Meanwhile, Benny Cousins is doing his best to make himself the most important man in Key Largo. And people who cross him have a way of vanishing mysteriously.

I wanted to like Tropical Freeze better than I did. The prose is really good – lines like “He was feeling sorry for Key Largo, for Florida, for North America. For men and women everywhere. For the race of lonely creatures that walked upright.” James W. Hall can turn a phrase (though he does have a problem with logical logistics, as when he has a guy carry three pistols in one hand).

But I found it impossible to like the characters in this book. The narrative forced us to spend considerable periods of time with sociopathic low-lifes, which always annoys me. But I didn’t even like the hero. I never had a sense of Thorn as a character. We’re told things about his background, but I never grasped him as a person.

And there’s was a pervading sense of gloom all through the story. I found it depressing.

Maybe you’ll like it better. Cautions for language and fairly explicit sexual situations.

Authors, Fiction, Publishing

An Undset day

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Above is the trailer for the 1995 Norwegian film production of Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, directed by Liv Ullman. As you’ll see from the link, it’s prohibitively expensive on Amazon, so I don’t expect I’ll be getting it on DVD. I do have the VHS version, but my machine isn’t hooked up so I can’t watch it.

I was, frankly, not entirely happy with the movie version. Liv Ullman was probably the least suitable director in the world; wholly unsympathetic to the author’s intentions. One could come away from watching it with the impression that Kristin and Erlend lived happily ever after, precisely not the point of the exercise.

But Sigrid Undset is on my mind tonight, because I just got an article about her accepted by a journal. My first draft was returned for improvements, which is of course kind of a bummer, but we professionals soldier on. I sent in a second draft, and they told me my prose was so good that they could go ahead and publish it without running it through the usual editorial processing.

That’s what I like to hear.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Weird Tales from the Northern Seas,’ by Jonas Lie

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In the days of our forefathers, when there was nothing but wretched boats up in Nordland, and folks must needs buy fair winds by the sackful from the Gan-Finn, it was not safe to tack about in the open sea in wintry weather. In those days a fisherman never grew old. It was mostly womenfolk and children, and lame and halt, who were buried ashore.

I thought I was buying a collection of north Norwegian folk stories when I purchased (OK, it was free) Weird Tales of the Northern Seas, by Jonas Lie (considered one of the “four greats” of Norwegian literature in the National Romantic period, along with Ibsen, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsson, and Alexander Kielland [whose writing retreat near Stavanger I visited this summer]). What I got was something somewhat different, and in some ways better. It certainly left its impression on this reader.

Jonas Lie wrote novels in the “realistic” style (I’ve never read any of them), but he didn’t mind incorporating a folk tale or two into them, as sort of psychological local color. He also assembled some collections of genuine folklore stories. It from both of these categories that the editor (and translator? I’m not sure) R. Nisbet Bain collected this volume in 1893.

These stories are grim. They mirror the attitudes of a culture that learned to eke a marginal existence from the cruel sea at the cost of perpetual danger and human tragedy. The monster that shows up most often here is the draug. The name refers to a kind of revenant in other parts of Norway, but in the north he was a sea-troll who had a head like a seal’s (or a lump of seaweed), who took ruthless, often long-delayed revenge on those who offended him. Most often the lesson of the story is that you will pay for your sins, and nothing can be done about it.

Probably the most famous of the stories is the first, “The Fisherman and the Draug,” which is exactly the sort of thing I just described. The one that impressed me most was the next, “Jack of Sjöholm and the Gan-Finn,” probably the weirdest of the collection. It shows the most obvious marks of literary craftsmanship, especially in its poetic, dream-like quality, and ends in an obscure manner that you never find in real folk tales.

But all in all, these stories are genuinely atmospheric and haunting. If you like this sort of thing, I recommend it. The translation isn’t bad – a little stilted, but that very likely echoes the original text. This was the 1890s, after all. The worst problem is that the footnotes at the end of each story aren’t linked, which creates a difficulty for non-Norwegian readers.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Desperate Justice,’ by Dennis Carstens

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Dennis Carstens is not a very good prose stylist. His diction can be awkward, even confusing, and his punctuation is best described as whimsical. But I like his characters, he poses very challenging moral problems to the reader, and he’s not politically doctrinaire.

At the beginning of Desperate Justice, Minneapolis attorney Marc Kadella is enjoying an upswing in his business fortunes. His success in his last big case has brought in needed clients. But when a prominent local defense attorney asks him to come on to defend his client’s co-defendant in a linked case, Marc is suspicious. Still, he takes the job, and soon regrets it. He and his client have been set up to take a fall, and Judge Gordon Prentiss – whom we remember with distaste from the last book – does not hesitate to take his personal rancor out on Marc’s client, who goes to prison.

So Marc is astonished when Judge Prentiss is himself charged with murder, and asks for Marc to defend him. Marc has no objection to representing a guilty man (and Prentiss looks guilty as sin), but he considers him a complete sleazeball. Which, the reader soon learns, is entirely correct. Perhaps the man ought to go to prison on general principles.

Desperate Justice is a kind of a diffuse story, which heads off in several directions before bringing it all together in the end. But I very much enjoyed the ethical dilemmas raised. What does “presumption of innocence” really mean? How do you defend a man you despise? How do you respond when even the good guys lie to you?

Stories of moral ambivalence can be corrosive and depressing, if they’re done nihilistically. But the Marc Kadella books never fall into nihilism. They ask honest questions, leaving the reader to draw judgments.

The politics seem pretty moderate to me, but the very fact that Democrats in Minnesota get criticized at all (Republicans come in for it too) is a breath of fresh air.

Cautions for language, sexual situations, and themes of extreme perversion.

Uncategorized

Death and decline in England

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The late queen.

As you’ve no doubt heard by now, Queen Elizabeth II, by the grace of God Queen of England, died today at the age of 96. She was the longest reigning monarch in English history, and the second-longest reigning in any country that we know of. Old and full of days, as the Bible says.

It’s yet another melancholy landmark in the lives of us oldlings. I was alive before Elizabeth reigned, just as I was alive during the Truman administration, but I remember neither. I recall being a child, and never having known a president other than Eisenhower. Today, in my dotage, I have no memory of a world without Queen Elizabeth.

What do I think of monarchy? I’ve flirted with monarchism as a political cause from time to time in my life, but I wouldn’t want it for the US. However, I’m an anglophile and a Norgephile (I don’t think that’s an actual word, but I mean a lover of Norway), and they’re both monarchies.

There’s an old conservative argument that monarchy is a stabilizing institution, one that binds a country to its traditions.

But I’m leery of what the new generation of monarchs will do.

Ah well, it’s all in the hands of God.

Speaking of England, everybody’s talking about the new Rings of Power TV series on Amazon Plus. I’m surprised, honestly, at the number of my Facebook friends who speak highly of it, so far.

Will I watch it? No, I don’t think so.

Here’s why.

I’m willing to watch a Middle Earth movie that’s based directly on a Tolkien story. I’ll give the producers the benefit of the doubt until I learn better (as you may recall, I liked the LOTR trilogy, did not like the Hobbit movies).

But if what I understand is correct, this series is based only on general outlines of events in the Silmarillion. That – in my view – grants the filmmakers too much freedom to pursue their own agendas.

Let’s not forget, Tolkien was a Catholic writer. His whole purpose in creating Middle Earth was to recreate a lost English mythology. Because he believed that mythology prefigured Christian truth (C. S. Lewis was converted on this argument), he believed that a faithful mythology would lead hearts to the Christian faith. He and Lewis invented the concept of “mythopoeia” for that very purpose.

The Amazon Plus series has not been conceived for that purpose. Therefore, in my view, it cannot be faithful to the author’s vision.

I’ll be happy to be proved wrong.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Ranching in Colorado,’ by J. L. Curtis

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I enjoyed the first book in my friend J. L. Curtis’ The Bell Chronicles, Showdown on the River, so I picked up book number two, Ranching in Colorado. The title’s a little generic, but the story was excellent.

Rio Bell, gunslinging Texas rancher’s son, survived the dangers of a trail drive and a range war, and now he has his reward. He’s married and owner of a large spread in Colorado. He wasn’t entirely prepared for mountain life or for northern winters, and when his wife gets pregnant he really feels out of his depth.

But he has some his hands with him, along with the crew of old mountain men who helped so much in his earlier adventures. He’ll learn the business, survive a stampede, and face back-shooting rustlers before he’s done.

I don’t know why I don’t read more westerns. I have an infinite taste for cowboy stories. This book was a little less bombastic than the first one; not much gunplay until the last third of the book or so.

I have quibbles, of course. Wedding dresses were not, as a rule, white in the 1870s. A woman we’re told is Scandinavian uses German words like “mit” (with) and “danke,” rather than “med” and “takk.” Some of the English diction is distractingly modern, like, “this baby is an affirmation of our commitment.”

But those are small things. Enjoy the story. Recommended.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Untold Story of the New Testament Church,’ by Frank Viola

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In our degenerate times, claiming that you’ve read the Bible multiple times through sounds like bragging (it wouldn’t have been as much of a big deal when I was starting out). That said, I’ll make so bold as to say that I’ve read the Bible, Old and New Testaments, multiple times. I’m pretty familiar with the narrative.

But I was intrigued by the premise of Frank Viola’s The Untold Story of the New Testament Church. The idea is to straighten out the chronological problems. The Old Testament isn’t laid out in order of events, but the historical books are generally chronological, which is helpful to the reader. But the New Testament is arranged by genre and book length. I won’t say that causes confusion, but it makes the message less coherent than it might be.

What author Viola has done here is to tell the story on a timeline, explaining the historical context (this is very valuable) and then inserting the various books (or rather, descriptions plus reading prompts) in their proper order, based on critical opinion and (sometimes) the author’s personal choices.

It’s a little humbling to admit that the book helped me understand New Testament history better, but it did. Some of the author’s choices are subjective and could be disputed, but all in all I thought the thing as a whole very helpful.

And I learned stuff. I was not aware that Titus was (arguably) Luke’s brother. Or that Gallio, the governor of Corinth, was brother to the philosopher Seneca.

The prose was occasionally a little awkward, and there’s a lamentable tendency to employ exclamation marks. But still, I recommend The Untold Story of the New Testament Church. I think it would be a great project for a Bible study group to work through this book, reading the scriptural books as they come up.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Bowmen of England,’ by Donald Featherstone

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These commanders who made such good use of archery as a national tactic had no real conception of the fact that in terminating the ascendency in war of the mailed horseman they were putting an end to the feudal regime and all that it entailed.

When you and I think of the medieval English bowman, we (unless you’re very weird) always think first of Robin Hood, in whatever cinematic or literary incarnation we know him. And there’s good reason for that. Robin Hood became an English national legend because he symbolized an important – and uniquely English – historical phenomenon. The English yeomanry enjoyed a very special status in Europe because they provided the manpower for English military archery, which made their country almost invincible on the battlefield for several centuries. Donald Featherstone’s Bowmen of England probably qualifies as a “classic” treatment of the subject, as it was first published 1968. No doubt some of the facts he cites represent scholarship that has since been revised or debunked. But as far as I can tell, the book remains a valuable introduction to the subject.

It opens with a fictional, dramatized scene of classic longbow tactics in battle. This part, I must admit, is rather badly written, and made me wonder what I was getting into as a reader. However, the author hits his stride when he moves on to plain exposition.

The longbow (traditionally, but not always, made of yew, usually imported) was first developed by the Welsh. But King Edward I (one can’t help thinking of Braveheart, but Edward is an admired figure here) recognized its value and adopted it for his own armies. He instituted universal archery practice for all common men, legislation that continued in force in various forms up into the Renaissance period.

Most of the book consists of a historical survey, especially of the Hundred Years’ War, in which the author describes the chief battles in which the longbow was decisive. The pattern is repetitive, and almost comic in a dark way. Again and again the English bowmen slaughtered massed French cavalry, at tremendous cost in lives, equipment and fighting expertise. And yet the French never learned. Every time they were certain that, given enough chivalry and valor, they’d whip the English this time.

Along the way we learn a fair amount about the construction of bows and the training of bowmen. We learn only a little about the military tactics of the time, but that’s only because they barely existed. There are also a lot of casualty figures, which are kind of depressing. It’s saddening to think how many lives were wasted in war in those days. (Sadder still to know that the situation hasn’t improved with time.)

There’s been a fashion in recent decades for publishing books about “The [fill in the blank] that changed the world.” If it had been written later, that title could have been applied to Bowmen of England. The longbow killed chivalry, altered the social order, and laid the groundwork for tactics in the Age of Gunpowder.

The book shows its age through its unabashed patriotism, but that’s just refreshing nowadays.

Recommended.