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Fiction, Reviews

‘Central City,’ by Indy Perro

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“Pete wants to know if there’s something there. He wants you to have the case because he believes you are honest and meticulous but still our guy, and we’re all on the same side…. I, on the other hand, didn’t want you on the case because I know you. I know you won’t let go of something if you don’t understand it.”

“Would you?”

“Yes. I’ve learned the hard way that sometimes you need to let things go. You can’t make the world right.”

Kane liked Detective Vincent Bayonne. Bayonne looked like a mountain man and a long-haul trucker had a coyote for a baby, but he had intuition.

A few days back I reviewed Indy Perro’s Welcome to the Party, a prequel to his noir mystery series featuring Detective Vince Bayonne and his gangster informant, Kane Kulpa. I noted that the writing and characterization were excellent. But that novella did not really prepare me for Central City, the first book in the series.

The year is 1992. The fictional Central City is run in the time-honored way – organized crime and the cops work in an uneasy partnership. Neither side wants blood in the streets. It’s bad for business. Even honest cops like Vince Bayonne “have a taste” from time to time; it’s the only way his criminal contacts will trust him. He has a new partner, a fat young man with brains but a lot to learn.

Kane Kulpa is right-hand man to two partners who run gambling and drugs and prostitution in a section of the city. He seems void of ambition. People think he’s lost the nerve that made him notorious during his time in prison. Few know about the mute, brain-damaged woman he shelters in his apartment.

When a naked man is found dead in a massage parlor, strangled with a belt and posed as if in prayer, Kane’s bosses want Bayonne on the case, for reasons explained in the snippet at the top of this review. But Bayonne is stymied. Usually, when he looks at a murder scene, it speaks to him, tells him a story. But this scene tells him nothing. When other men are found murdered the same way, he flounders. Meanwhile, a gang war starts, and Kane will have to decide where his loyalty lies.

I was very impressed with Central City. This is about as noir as a novel gets. The violence was shocking, the final resolution (mostly) a surprise. And Indy Perro is simply a knockout wordslinger. His descriptions fascinate, and his characters are compelling.

Still, I wasn’t entirely happy. The final resolution seemed a little too grand opera, too over the top. The story offers one of those familiar crime scenarios where really bad people – pimps and drug dealers – are rendered sympathetic simply by the fact that they’re contrasted with opponents who are monsters. And the picture of how a city works was simply depressing (worse because you can’t be sure it’s exaggerated).

Also, the author used “begging the question” wrong once. With his gifts, he should know better.

A notable eccentricity in the story is the information, casually related, that one of the city’s criminal bosses is a Lutheran pastor.

I hope Central City is excessive in its picture of the world. On the other hand, certain characters do exhibit genuine nobility from time to time.

I’m not sure what my final judgment on Central City is. Except that it was extremely well written and atmospheric. It left an impression. Definitely worth reading, if you like to take your Noir straight.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Presumption of Death,’ by Jill Paton Walsh

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…Like the gentleman in the carol, I have seen a wonder sight—the Catholic padre and the refugee Lutheran minister having a drink together and discussing, in very bad Latin, the persecution of the Orthodox Church in Russia. I have seldom heard so much religious toleration or so many false quantities…

A while ago I reviewed Thrones, Dominations, the first Lord Peter Wimsey novel written by the late Jill Paton Walsh, based on notes by Dorothy Sayers, the creator of the character. I generally liked it, though I thought it sometimes a little forced.

But I thought I’d try the next book in the series, A Presumption of Death, a book Ms. Walsh wrote all by herself, based on a suggestion from Sayers’ writings. She took on a great challenge, but in my opinion the results were almost pitch perfect.

It’s 1939, and England is at war. British forces are on the back foot in Norway (there are many references to Norway in this story). Lord Peter Wimsey, long an asset of British Intelligence, is doing some kind of hush-hush, dangerous work in a place he’s not at liberty to reveal. His nephew Gerald is having the time of his life as an RAF pilot. Harriet Vane, Lord Peter’s wife, has moved the family – including her two babies – from London to Tallboys, to the country house they acquired in Busman’s Honeymoon. In the town, airmen from a nearby base are having a lot of fun with the “land girls,” city girls enlisted to do farm work in the absence of male workers.

Then, after the town’s first air raid drill, one of the girls is found murdered – clearly killed by someone familiar with unarmed combat. The local police detective asks Harriet to help him with the investigation – he feels out of his depth, and she has experience in these things, both as a detective novelist and as a collaborator with her husband. But she makes little progress. Then another body is found – that of a convalescing airman who’d rented a local cottage, apparently slaughtered in a makeshift abattoir in the Wimsey’s barn. When that airman’s identification proves questionable, mystery piles on mystery. That’s when Lord Peter himself appears at last. His exalted connections allow him, with Harriet’s help, to get to the truth of the situation.

I can honestly say that I completely forgot that I was reading a pastiche as I read A Presumption of Death. The book seemed to me a completely successful recreation of the characters, the settings, and the period. If Dorothy Sayers had continued writing Lord Peter books, I’m pretty sure she’d have produced something very much like this. The resolution of the book, in particular, seemed to me very much in Sayers’ spirit – a reconciliation of justice and mercy, with an ambivalent suggestion that mercy might not be as merciful as we imagine.

One annoying peculiarity in the book was the author’s repeated misspelling of the word “bailing” in “bailing out” (of an airplane). She spells it “baling.” The editors should have caught this (assuming it’s not just spelled differently in England).

I was also surprised to learn that (according to Lord Peter’s sister) the Delagardie side of Lord Peter’s family is not French, but Swedish.

Anyway, I relished A Presumption of Death. Well done.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Ghost Orchid,’ by Jonathan Kellerman

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He had the kind of bony body that seems to diminish when it settles, as if inadequately supported by musculature. Crossing his legs had the effect of compressing him further.

If I remember correctly, when Jonathan Kellerman started writing his Alex Delaware/Milo Sturgis novels, they proceeded more or less in real time. The characters aged like you and I. But the series has been going on for decades now, and in a real world both of them would be long retired, if not dead (especially with Milo’s dietary habits). I think Kellerman has made the decision to freeze them, and they won’t be ageing anymore. Indeed, Milo’s hair, which sported gray stripes for a long time, is now described as fully black again.

And that’s good news. It means the books can go on as long as Kellerman can keep cranking them out. So long may he live, and keep writing.

The last book ended with a bang, and psychologist Alex is still recovering physically as The Ghost Orchid begins. Cop Milo feels guilty about putting him in harm’s way, and so has not called for his assistance in a while. Alex, on the other hand, is finding the inactivity tedious. Finally, Milo calls. He has a couple murder victims not far from Alex’s house, in case he’d care to have a look. Alex quickly responds.

Af first it doesn’t appear to be any particularly mystery. An attractive couple, she rather older than he, both naked and shot to death next to his pool. Her wealthy husband is the obvious suspect.

But the husband was out of the country at the time of the murder, and more than that he genuinely seems to have been ignorant of her infidelity. And she turns out to be an enigma – a false identity which, traced back, leads to another false identity. Who was she? Where did she come from? Or was this about her lover? Did he have some dark secret?

The Ghost Orchid is mostly a psychological narrative, telling a story of horrific abuse and its ramifications. The puzzle is more important than the suspense or action this time out, and that suits me just fine.

The Ghost Orchid offered the usual, familiar pleasures of a Jonathan Kellerman mystery. I enjoyed it. There are a couple Christian characters, and they come off as sympathetic. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Welcome to the Party,’ by Indy Perro

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“You think I’m in the wrong line of work?”

“I think running a bar can be more fun than most jobs, including mine. It can also be a lot of work.”

“People deserve a cold one after a long day.”

“People enjoy a cold one. I’m not sure what any of us deserve.”

I knew nothing of Indy Perro, author of the novella Welcome to the Party, before I picked it up on a free offer. But I was happy with what I got.

It’s 1973 (this is, I think, a prequel story). Vincent Bayonne is a rookie cop in (the fictional) Central City. He’s recently back from Vietnam. He misses the action, and became a cop for the danger, and maybe to make a difference. But so far, the work has been pretty routine. He and his veteran partner are assigned to what’s considered a plum day’s assignment – providing security for a mayoral candidate who’ll be making a speech at a VFW post.

The candidate, it turns out, is both a lush and a lech. The crowd will turn out a little more rambunctious than expected. And Vincent will get the opportunity to save a life.

Welcome to the Party is a simple story. The writing is spare and clean, the characters believable and sympathetic. I was impressed. I’ve purchased the next book in the series, and look forward to seeing where this is going.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Do-Overs,’ by Jon Spoelstra

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Time travel books form an interesting sub-genre of science fiction. Some writers like to play with the inherent paradoxes of the time-line – what happens if the hero kills his own grandfather? What happens if he meets himself? Suppose you killed Hitler as a baby – would fate provide a second-string substitute and history go on pretty much the same?

Other time travel stories are more about memory and regret. That’s the case with Jon Spoelstra’s Do-Overs, a book tailor-made to appeal to people of a certain age, who have life regrets. As a man who meets both criteria, I liked it.

Roy Hobbs (same name as the hero of The Natural) used to be a Chicago news reporter. Then his ex-wife, whom he still cared for, fell victim to a vicious serial killer. Roy wrote a bestselling book about the murders. But he lost all the money he earned.

Now he’s gotten an invitation from a reclusive billionaire, one of the old Silicon Valley computer moguls. He and a group of his fellow billionaires have pooled their resources on something like a privately funded Manhattan Project. Their purpose was to prove the existence of parallel universes. This, he says, they have accomplished. There are multitudes of parallel universes, mostly differing from one another only in minor details. By traveling between these universes, it’s possible to move about in time – though never in our own universe; only in the others.

What he wants from Roy, he says, is a book. A book only he himself will read. He wants the book to describe Roy’s own subjective experiences in parallel universes, not the science. The payment will be princely. Roy sees no reason to refuse.

Naturally, he travels to his own past. There, he observes himself meeting his wife for the first time. He is astonished at the sensation of seeing her, and falling in love again. But on another trip, as he’s following her around, she notices him and makes an excuse to meet him. She feels, she tells him, a strange attraction to him (in spite of their near-thirty-year age difference). Apparently, Roy comes to believe, there’s such a thing as a “cosmic connection,” which binds souls (or something) together, even across universes.

Enthused by this renewed passion, Roy makes up his mind to travel to many universes and stop the killer early in his career, saving his wife and as many women as possible. What he doesn’t realize is that this cosmic connection connects more than love – he may have given the murderer the key to a longer, even bloodier career in countless iterations.

Do-Overs was adequately written. The prose wasn’t memorable, and there were occasional grammatical slips, as in when we’re told a character “had drank” wine. The narrator also speaks of an “uncompromising position” when he means a “compromising position.”

But the storytelling was adequate, it kept my interest, and I cared about the characters. We’ve all imagined going back and fixing our lives’ mistakes. It was pleasant to follow a character doing just that.

There was a little more sex than I thought necessary in this book, and it was just a tad more explicit than it had to be. Is it immoral to go to bed with a woman you just met, when she’s been your wife already in another universe? Intriguing question.

However that is, I found Do-Overs quite a lot of fun. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Lone Wolf,’ by Gregg Hurwitz

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Clouds boiled up over the opposing ridge, backlit and tumultuous. A scorched violet sangria sky breathed its last breaths. Nighttime had dusk in its teeth already, choking it out. There was electricity in the air, and the sky was vast and dangerous, and somewhere far to the west over the Malibu hills, the tide thrashed against the coast. Alone for a moment on this spot, Evan had the feeling of standing on the planet itself.

At this point in my reading life, there are two annual events I look forward to like Christmas. One is Andrew Klavan’s Cameron Winter novels. The other is Gregg Hurwitz’s Orphan X novels. A new Orphan X is just out. It’s called Lone Wolf, and I think it may be the best so far.

Evan Smoak, our hero, lives his life according to his operational Ten Commandments (essentially based on Twelve Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson, who is a friend of the author). This keeps his existence tight and controlled, as he carries out his vocation of helping the helpless, when summoned by a call to his private phone number.

So it’s out of character for him to lose himself for days on an alcoholic binge. But that’s just what he’s doing at the beginning of Lone Wolf. To be fair, he’s been having a rough time lately. His goth foster daughter Joey, who just started college, has decided she wants to pledge a sorority, and is suffering all kinds of female angst. The neighbors at his condo are trying to involve him in a HOA president takeover scheme. But the real problem is that he just met – at last – his birth father, and the meeting was nothing at all like he’d anticipated.

But he has another family member, also recently discovered – a loser, alcoholic brother. And that brother has a daughter – Evan’s niece. When she calls in desperation, asking Evan to help her find her missing dog (the ugliest dog Evan ever saw), he tries to explain that this isn’t the kind of thing he does. But her tears move him irrationally. Okay, he’ll do what he can.

Little does he know that the search will lead him to a murder – the murder of a brilliant scientist in the Artificial Intelligence field. When he realizes that this murder is just one in a string of assassinations, all carried out against people with connections to cutting-edge computing, he has to go hunting for the assassin, who turns out to be an incredibly dangerous – and ruthless – young woman.

Gregg Hurwitz turns out excellent prose (though I did catch one grammatic error). But where he really excels is as a plotter. Lone Wolf is packed with breakneck action, and the breathing intervals feature hilarious farce, as Evan and Joey, each in their own ways, find themselves operating in worlds way outside their comfort zones.

There’s also a disturbing preview of a possible dystopian future. And in the end, another personal kick in the stomach for Evan.

Lone Wolf is a really, really good novel, in spite of some “girl boss” moments. Cautions for language and violence.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saga of Grettir the Strong,’ part 2

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The father and son parted with little love lost between them. Many people wished Grettir a safe journey, but few a safe return.

I have finished reading The Saga of Grettir the Strong, in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. I have much to say about it, though I fear a lot of it strays into the deep grass.

My main takeaway from the saga, as I stated yesterday, is that the real-life hero, Grettir Asmundarsson, seems to have been a psychopath, very likely suffering from PTSD. Even in a book written in the 14th Century, his status echoes ancient tribal attitudes. The heroes of ancestral times were not admired for their moral virtue. A remnant of this world view remains, in residual form, even in our English language. Our word “great” has two meanings. The common one (in our time) is that of “important” or “admirable.” But its older meaning was “large.” We still speak of a Great Hall or a greatcoat. In the same way, old heroes like Sigurd the Dragon Slayer could massacre whole villages of innocent people and still be considered heroes and great men. Because greatness was about magnitude, not virtue. Likewise, Grettir is a hero because he does things in a big way, whether it’s killing men or lifting heavy objects.

Reading the saga from a historical perspective, I noted that most of the episodes where Grettir comes off as heroic by our standards – a virtuous hero – are implausible scenes involving either invulnerable berserkers or supernatural creatures like witches or ghosts. Even the scenes of Grettir’s death, which are likely to have some factual base, are embroidered with elements of witch’s curses, which the saga writer found necessary in order to explain his invulnerable hero’s death at the hands of common men. (Though in an odd interpolation, Grettir finds a friend who’s even stronger than himself. No actual magic is attributed to this character, but one gets the feeling he’s not entirely human.)

The only plausible episode where Grettir exhibits mercy is one calculated to advance his own interests. He spares the life of a son of Snorri the Godi [Chieftain] (an important saga character who makes a brief appearance in my novel, West Oversea), who has come out after him as a sort of bounty hunter. Grettir understands that winning Snorri’s friendship through letting his son live could win him a powerful friend, something he badly needs by now.

Indeed, one remarkable thing about Grettir’s saga is the fact that he had all kinds of prominent connections – “Almost all the chieftains in the country were related to Grettir… either by blood or by marriage.” He’s related to the Norwegian royal family too. And yet he can’t seem to catch a break with the law. (For all I’ve written and said about the importance of the Law to the Norse, your father’s status and who you knew counted for a lot. Rich men’s sons could usually find a way to wiggle out of legal scrapes with their skin intact, even as today. The fact that Grettir couldn’t make this old boy network work for him, seems to have convinced his family and friends that he must have been under some unique curse).

There’s a hint of character development in the later chapters, when Grettir, formerly entirely reckless of consequences, now searches for a way to attain a peaceful life. He’s been outlawed, which means he can’t leave the country and is legal prey for killing. In the end, he will hold the record for survival in an outlaw state – 20 years (though there’s some inconsistency about that figure in the text here). He holes up on the natural fortress of Drangey island, where he fights off repeated attacks. It’s at this point that he becomes a more sympathetic character. He’s terrified of the dark and of being alone – though he knows from experience that few men are to be trusted. Still, I couldn’t help wondering what his killers’ real story is – Grettir has been living by robbery, and he never hesitated to use violence. Stealing sheep and other food could have serious consequences in a marginal economy  The charge that his killers employed witchcraft is not impossible (at least technically – I don’t believe their magic actually worked), but it seems to me more likely the witchcraft stuff was added by the author (who was possibly related to Grettir) in order to make his hero more sympathetic. No small task, with this guy’s record.

An element in the saga which I’d never noticed before (perhaps it was bowdlerized in previous translations I’ve read, or maybe I just forgot) is a couple sexual situations. In one scene, which would have played better in the 14th Century than it does today, a serving woman makes fun of Grettir’s physical endowment, so he rapes her to teach her a lesson. In another, he spends some time sharing a house with a woman whose husband is away, saving her from a monstrous troll woman who’s been ravaging the farm. He leaves a souvenir behind:

Towards the end of that summer, Steinvor from Sandhaugar gave birth to a boy named Skeggi. At first he was said to be the son of Kjartan…. Skeggi was distinguished from all his brothers and sisters by his strength and build. By the age of fifteen he was the strongest person in north Iceland, and then his paternity was attributed to Grettir. Everyone thought he would grow into an outstanding man, but he died at the age of sixteen and there are no stories about him.

In sum, the Saga of Grettir the Strong is a powerful and memorable tale, and an amateur psychologist like me can spend unlimited time picking out clues concerning its underlying facts. That game can go on forever, because there’s no way to prove them wrong.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saga of Grettir the Strong,’ part 1

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This is a partial review. The book I’ve been reading is one of the longer sagas in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, and (as I’ve said before) my reading time has been limited lately. But I’m about half way through with this one, so I thought I’d do what I’ve done with some other longer works in the past. This is an incremental review, my thoughts on what I’ve read so far. The saga under consideration is The Saga of Grettir the Strong, one of the great classics.

I’ve read Grettir’s Saga at least three times before, so the material is familiar. But my response this time is a little different from previous ones. Perhaps it’s this translation, which is more literal than most. I’m not generally a booster of literal translating, but possibly it’s conveying some nuances I’ve missed in the past. In any case, I find I have less sympathy for the hero this time around.

The Icelandic sagas are classic stories of violence on the frontier, stories that anticipate the American Western. One of the standard themes of the Westerns is, “What do we do with violent men, who are valuable but expensive?” We want the gunfighter to come in and clean up the town, but then we’d prefer him to ride off into the sunset and bother somebody else.

Grettir Asmundarsson is often referred to in the saga as “an accomplished man.” But the only accomplishments of his (aside from composing poetry) that we observe are fighting and lifting heavy objects. His family and friends support him (cautiously) because of his value in a brawl, but his impulse control seems poor, and he shows little indication of ever being domesticated, or wanting to be.

In fact, he shows all the signs of PTSD. He’s quick to react violently, he’s suspicious and socializes poorly, and he suffers night terrors. In the saga, this weakness is explained by a nightmarish fight with a revenant, what I called a “walker-again” in my novels – the Scandinavian ghost that’s kind of like a vampire or zombie. Grettir’s nightmarish fight with Glam, the ghost, is portrayed as an experience of such overwhelming horror that even our bold hero can’t undergo it without emotional scars (though he does, needless to say, “kill” the ghost.) What happened to the real-life Grettir we’ll never know, but fighting monsters is a pretty good metaphor for a traumatic experience in combat.

And that’s about all I can really say in Grettir’s defense. The rare occasions in the saga where he appears sympathetically are the most fantastic and implausible – like the ghost-fight, or his rescuing of a houseful of defenseless women from rapist berserkers. These are saga set pieces, the kind of episodes that show up again and again in sagas to keep things lively. I doubt they actually happened in the man’s life.

What I do believe is the stories of his murders, which generally seem to be acts of impulse and overkill.

More on Grettir tomorrow.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Bishop Murder Case,’ by S. S. Van Dine

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Tonight, another mystery classic. I was familiar with the name of the author, S. S. Van Dine, but I knew his Philo Vance character only through old movies (William Powell was the first to play him). Raymond Chandler called Philo Vance “the most asinine character in detective fiction,” and now that I’ve read The Bishop Murder Case, I can’t argue with him (though that was before Lawrence Sanders invented Archy McNally).

Philo Vance, New York City esthete and amateur detective, is called upon by the district attorney (who has apparently decided, after a couple of cases, that he can’t operate without the young twit’s help) to visit the home of the mathematician Prof. Dillard. In an archery range next to the house, a young friend of the family has been found killed by an arrow. Suspicion immediately falls on another young male friend, a rival for the affections of the professor’s daughter. But when a cryptic note is delivered to a newspaper, associating the killing with the nursery rhyme, “Who Killed Cock Robin?”, they all realize that this was part of a cold-blooded plan. When other murders, all with Mother Goose themes, follow, it comes down to breaking alibis and analyzing personalities – just the sort of thing at which Philo Vance excels.

What did I dislike about The Bishop Murder Case? First of all, the prose was stilted, over-long, and unnatural. The dialogue doesn’t sound like anything real people (even dilettantes) would say, and the narrative includes such lines as “’Sit down, Pyne,’ said Vance, with peremptory kindness.” (What does “peremptory kindness” mean?) There are some similarities to Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, but Lord Peter was always self-aware, and he played his eccentricities for laughs. Vance is singularly humorless.

Secondly, Vance relies heavily on very simplistic Freudian psychology, which has not aged well. The author goes so far as to affirm that extreme (even cruel) cynicism is a sign of mental health, because it eases repressions(!).

By this time in history, we’re used to seeing amateur sleuths in fiction working in cooperation with the official police, but the kind of slavish devotion the police in this book show to Philo Vance – to the extent that he actually takes the lead in their interrogations – is hard to swallow. They even let him bully them into breaking into a house without a warrant (in a very good cause, I’ll admit, but it was still implausible). The bulk of the district attorney’s business, it appears, is conducted at the stylish Stuyvesant Club, where Vance is also a member.  Also, a man is held in jail on suspicion long after events have pretty clearly demonstrated his innocence. Apparently habeus corpus doesn’t exist in Philo Vance’s world.

There’s a Norwegian character here, and I have to say I hated him cordially (among his other sins, he’s an Ibsen fan).

The author, S. S. Van Dine, is an interesting – and perhaps revealing – case study. His real name was Willard Huntington Wright, and he was a prominent art critic in the early 20th century. He was also a cocaine addict and a German sympathizer during World War I. When his career foundered, he took up writing mysteries, despite the fact that he despised the genre. In an exquisite irony of fate, his books proved popular, and he came to depend on them for a living. Applying a little Freudian psychology of my own, I wonder how much his self-hatred contributed to the generally acknowledged deterioration of his work over time. (And it wasn’t great at its best, if The Bishop Murder Case is any indication.)

In short, I did not enjoy The Bishop Murder Case. It dragged on and on, annoying me increasingly as I read. Recommended only if you want to fill a hole in your education in Golden Age mystery stories.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Fire, Burn!’ by John Dickson Carr

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I’ve read a little John Dickson Carr in my time – mostly short stories. An American who set his stories primarily in England, Carr is most famous for his characters Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale. He was one of the foremost mystery writers of his time, but I’ve always found his work a trifle dull, like most of the “Cozy” subgenre.

I’d never heard of his character Inspector John Cheviot before. A web search told me little about him. I get the impression Cheviot is the hero of at least one other book, and that both involve time travel as well as murder. I would like to know more about the underlying science fictional rationale for the time jump, because while this book, Fire, Burn!, was intriguing, I have questions.

At the beginning of the book, Inspector Cheviot gets into a London cab in the mid-1950s, and suddenly finds himself riding in a hansom cab in the late 1820s. He’s not exactly an intruder in the past – he seems to be a well-known figure in London Society – not always in a positive way. One of his scandalous activities is applying to be part of the newly organized London Metropolitan Police – the very first iteration of Scotland Yard. His application to be their new Superintendent is shocking, as Yard detectives are definitely not supposed to be gentlemen. They are essentially thugs, thieves set to catch thieves, and the population despises them.

But Cheviot – still conscious of being a 20th Century man – is galvanized. He’s long been a student of Yard history, and he’s often dreamed of the things he could have accomplished there with his modern knowledge and investigative techniques.

He soon gets a chance to show what he can do. Sent (rather contemptuously) to investigate the theft of bird seed from exotic bird cages belonging to a prominent society lady, he witnesses a young woman’s murder. The woman is shot to death, but he hears no gunshot, and no one seemed to be in a position to fire the fatal bullet.

On a personal level, Cheviot finds himself already in a relationship with a beautiful, passionate woman. He also makes a deadly enemy – an arrogant and cruel military officer who challenges him to a duel.

Where Fire, Burn! really excelled as a novel (in this reader’s opinion) was in its vivid recreation of early 19th Century London. The author had clearly done a lot of research, and the descriptions were highly convincing.

The mystery was also pretty good. The solution was clever, and I didn’t see it coming – though I thought I did. The book moved a little slowly (by the debased standards of this present age), and the female characters seemed a little stylized, the kind of languid females who are always getting the vapors in old dramas. Nevertheless, all in all, I rate Fire, Burn! high as an original historical mystery.

I do wish we were given some clue as to how Cheviot travels through time, though. Is it a dream? A rift in the Third Dimension? No clue is offered, and the book ends very abruptly.