Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Case of the Careless Kitten’ by Erle Stanley Gardner

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Picked up another Perry Mason mystery by Erle Stanley Gardner. I enjoyed the first one I read. The Case of the Careless Kitten didn’t please me quite as much, but it offered some interesting looks at some of the characters.

Helen Kendal wants to marry a soldier (the book is set in 1942), but her guardian, her aunt, is opposed to the match. If the aunt’s husband, Helen’s uncle, who disappeared ten years ago, were declared legally dead, Helen would have money coming from his will, and would be able to afford marriage. But the aunt insists her husband is still alive.

Then one day, Helen’s pet kitten shows signs of poisoning. She rushes the animal to a veterinarian. But that same evening, the aunt suffers poisoning too, and has to go to the hospital.

Meanwhile, Helen has gotten a call from a man who identifies himself as her missing uncle. He wants her to hire the lawyer Perry Mason, and go with him to meet a man at a seedy hotel. That man will lead them to a meeting with the uncle. Thus the mystery begins.

If it all seems a little convoluted, I thought so too. This was a complicated story, and I found it a little work to keep up.

On the other hand, I was intrigued to see the Perry Mason characters in a pre-Raymond Burr light. I’ve often read that author Gardner rarely described his characters, but this book was richer in character description than most. And it contradicts the later TV portrayals. I wonder if Gardner didn’t make it a point to eliminate descriptions after the show started, in order to promote it.

Perry Mason was, we are informed here, a tall man. I don’t think Raymond Burr was notably tall. (I remember reading, in one short story, that Mason was slender-waisted. Definitely not true of Burr.) Mason and his secretary Della Street also seemed much more romantically involved here than they would on TV.

We’re told here that Hamilton Burr was a big, bullish man. Not much like William Talman.

Lieutenant Tragg, the police detective, was the greatest surprise. He’s a young man, we’re told here, and well-dressed. The TV casting people definitely went another way with Ray Collins.

I found the final solution of the book pretty complicated, and Mason’s choice for explaining it all a little disappointing. Nevertheless, The Case of the Careless Kitten was professionally written and highly readable.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Barrier Island,’ by John D. MacDonald

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John D. MacDonald, who had a business degree, occasionally strayed from conventional mystery scenarios to write a business story. I don’t think Barrier Island was a publishing blockbuster, but MacDonald had the clout to get it published, and it’s effective.

Our hero is Wade Rowley, a real estate broker on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. He has a partner, Bern Gibbs. Bern is an old friend, but their different business styles (and willingness to skirt legalities) are beginning to strain their association. Wade is especially concerned about a recent deal Bern took them into with Tucker Loomis, a swashbuckling local property developer. Bern assisted Tucker with land purchases for an extravagant new development on a barrier island. But now the government is seizing the island for environmental protection, and Tucker is suing for lost profits. Wade has a sneaking suspicion that the whole thing was a scam from the start. Tuck Loomis must have known the island was fragile and unstable. He probably leveraged his assets to buy up the land cheap so he could profit big from the government settlement.

Wade goes to visit one of the “property owners” listed in the development records, and discovers that the man is both poor and a Loomis employee. So he goes to a friend in the government and gives him the information, just in case the whole thing blows up on them. When Bern finds out about that, they get in a fight and agree to dissolve their partnership.

But that’s all before a murder happens.

Barrier Island was John D. MacDonald’s last novel, published in 1986. It reflects the author’s long-standing concern for environmental preservation, as well as (I suspect) the influence of the “Dynasty”-style prime time soap operas that were popular at the time. There was the same fascination here with the lifestyles and peccadillos of the rich, but at its heart the story is a morality tale. All the main characters are fully fleshed out, and even when we don’t like them. we’re permitted to observe their motivations, which are not always base.

Barrier Island wasn’t John D. MacDonald at the top of his game, but he was incapable of writing a bad story. Cautions for adult situations.

Fiction, Reviews

Saga reading report: ‘Gisli Sursson’s Saga’

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Gisli, his wife Aud, and their foster-daughter from Dasent’s 1866 translation. The weird headdress is (I believe) based on a much later Icelandic folk costume.

Today, we return to the world of the sagas as I report on Gisli Sursson’s Saga from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. It’s one of the more popular sagas, though the manuscript versions we have (there are three) exhibit a fair number of textual problems.

The story begins, as so many sagas do, with the hero’s ancestors in Norway. One of those ancestors, also named Gisli, borrows a sword from a thrall (how did a thrall get a sword? Outside of one of my novels, I mean?). He refuses to return the sword, he and the thrall kill each other, and the sword ends up broken. The shards are kept, and are later forged into a spearhead. But the metal carries the thrall’s curse.

The family relocates to Iceland, where Gisli is born. He grows up to be a tall man and a great warrior. But he finds himself in a classic honor dilemma – his sister’s husband kills his wife’s brother (who is also his best friend), and Gisli is torn between loyalties (Note: this line has been edited, thanks to a correction by Matt McKendrick). He finally kills his sister’s husband, in his bed, with the cursed spear.

This is an odd element in the saga for me, because I’ve often read that a murder at night was considered shameful murder among the Norse. However, in this translation, it’s explained that if the weapon is left in the body, that mitigates the crime.

In any case, eventually the truth comes out, and Gisli is outlawed. He manages, with the help of a couple rich friends and (especially) his wife, to avoid the avengers for many years – surviving second longest of any Icelandic outlaw, after Grettir the Strong. His last stand is legendary, and his killers go home without honor.

Gisli’s Saga has a high reputation among Icelanders, though there are elements that make it hard for the modern reader to appreciate. Part of the trouble is moral. Gisli (and he’s not alone among saga heroes) has a sense of humor that looks pretty cruel to us. In particular, on two occasions he switches clothes with a thrall to confuse avengers – in one case getting the thrall killed. In both cases, the thralls are described as very stupid – to the original saga readers, the killing of a stupid thrall seemed a triviality.

Another problem is story gaps. At one point, we’re told that Gisli drops his sword as he’s fleeing his enemies. Later on, he has it again. How that happens is not explained. Twice Gisli receives leg wounds under identical circumstances, but they lead to nothing.

What sets the saga apart for the modern reader, I think, is the prominence of Gisli’s wife Aud in the plot. That’s especially remarkable considering that Gisli killed her brother. Aud is utterly faithful, even refusing a large bribe to betray him, and he acknowledges at one point that he wouldn’t have lasted so long without her help.

Gisli Sursson’s Saga is an important outlaw saga, but I don’t think it’ll ever be one of my favorites.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Darker Than Amber,’ by John D. MacDonald

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She sat up slowly, looked in turn at each of us, and her dark eyes were like twin entrances to two deep caves. Nothing lived in those caves. Maybe something had, once upon a time. There were piles of picked bones back in there, some scribbling on the walls, and some gray ash where the fires had been.

Revisited another Travis McGee book by John D. MacDonald, because they never do get old. Darker Than Amber is one of the best, I think. The story works out as dark as the title promises, but that makes the moments of grace shine all the brighter.

Trav and his friend, the economist Meyer, are fishing under a bridge in Marathon, Florida when somebody drops a girl, wired to a cement block, off the deck above. Trav being Trav, he leaps into the water immediately, managing to get her back to the surface in time to save her life with artificial respiration.

She turns out to be a beautiful young woman named Vangie, but she’s no innocent damsel in distress. She’s a prostitute who worked her way up to a very nasty con game in which they not only robbed, but murdered, selected men. Because she experienced a moment of sympathy for one victim, her partners decided to kill her. But she’s “case-hardened,” as Travis puts it, and in the end she can’t be saved, either morally or physically. After a second murder attempt succeeds, Trav makes up his mind to balance the scales for her.

I first encountered Darker Than Amber in its movie adaptation, on TV (I reviewed that film here). The book, needless to say, is a lot better. What is portrayed as an extended, improbable slug-fest between Rod Taylor and William Smith in the film is in the book a very neat gaslighting sting that works, not perfectly, but well enough to satisfy the reader.

Darker Than Amber was published in 1966 and shows its age, but that’s part of its value, it seems to me. Trav’s sexual mores will satisfy neither today’s conservatives nor liberals, but they weren’t remarkable for his time – except perhaps for his admission that he can work up no attraction whatever to Vangie’s shopworn charms.

There’s a scene where a black character delivers a little lecture about civil rights. It must have sounded sophisticated at the time, but it too hasn’t aged well.

Still, that’s how the world looked in those days. The best thing about the book, as always, is Trav himself – he picks up the Philip Marlowe tradition of opening up to the reader about his inner life. But he takes it further. And the reader can’t help liking his self-deprecating manner.

Highly recommended. Cautions for mature subject matter.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Man In the Water,’ by Jon Hill

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Jack Green, hero of Man In the Water, is a Pennsylvania salesman and spare-time conspiracy theorist. He married out of his league, and he and his beautiful wife Stacey have a five-year-old boy they adore. When Stacey gets some troubling medical news, her mother pays for them to take a Caribbean cruise, so they can have a carefree time together before facing whatever challenges will come.

It’s great until they’re attacked in their cabin one night, and Jack finds himself struggling for his life, only to return home alone and find his son missing. Realizing that the authorities are unwilling to do much about the case, Jack turns to a cop friend, who refers him to an FBI agent he knows. And suddenly all those conspiracies Jack has been talking about about take on new – and personal – meaning.

I suppose the first thing I should say about Man In the Water is that it was a page-turner. I kept with it to the end, in spite of elements I didn’t much care for. So the book succeeded in that respect.

But even as I read, I was nitpicking. The writing was pretty slapdash. Words are used imprecisely, as for instance, “qualms” where “doubts” is wanted. This is one of those stories where an ordinary guy gets thrown in among professional killers, which always raises the problem of how to get him out alive without overdoing the luck factor. In my opinion, the luck factor did get overdone here. And the action itself seemed cinematic and implausible.

Even worse, the book ends with a cliffhanger, its central plot problem unresolved. I don’t like that. Ongoing secondary plot threads are fine in a series, but you need to resolve this book’s main plot problem in this book. So that annoyed me.

I think this series is working on having a Christian theme. Jack is an agnostic, and he often spends time thinking about the God question. I would expect him to possibly come to faith further down the line.

But I won’t be reading down the line. Man In the Water wasn’t awful, and I did finish it. But I didn’t like it enough to spring for the sequel.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Cursing Stones Murder,’ by George Bellairs

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I’ve read and reviewed one of George Bellairs’ Inspector Littlejohn novels before. I found the book likeable but not outstanding. That’s pretty much my reaction to The Cursing Stones Murder too.

Inspector Littlejohn and his wife are planning a “holiday,” (as they say in England), but a plea from a friend persuades them to change their itinerary. Archdeacon Kinrade, a clergyman in a town on the Isle of Man, is concerned about one of his young parishioners, who has been arrested on suspicion of murder. A local womanizer’s body has been dredged up by scallop fishermen, and circumstantial evidence points to the young man. But Kinrade is certain he’s innocent. Littlejohn feels obligated to the archdeacon for past favors, and Man is a pleasant place to visit, so they change their plans.

Littlejohn has no actual authority on Man, but the local police detective seems happy to have his unofficial help. The young accused man is soon released, but the case proves to be the kind where there are too many people with motives. On top of that, people who know secrets are deliberately trying to mislead the police, in order to protect others.

The Cursing Stones Murder is a decent mystery, but written for an audience now dead (around 1950). It’s more of a cozy than a police procedural, and suffers (I would suggest) from containing too many nice characters. I like a book that keeps the violence low, but in this case I was sometimes in danger of losing interest altogether – until the end, when stuff started happening, leading to one of those classic cozy endings where the decent people who’ve made mistakes are allowed to die rather than face the law.

Inspector Littlejohn himself is not a very vivid character, and characterization isn’t author Bellairs’ forte. Mrs. Littlejohn seems to have almost no personality at all – she is endlessly supportive and never complains about the continual changes her husband makes in their plans. She’s almost the perfect pre-feminist wife, but I’m not sure such women actually ever existed.

The writing is good, and the Manx landscapes well exploited. If you’re looking for a quiet mystery without a lot of bad language or violence, The Cursing Stones Murder may be what you’re looking for.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Inside Man,’ by M. A. Rothman

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The year’s almost over, so I think I can safely say that, in all likelihood, M. A. Rothman’s The Inside Man boasts the weirdest scenario I’ve come across in a novel all year. It’s effectively written and entertaining, but bizarre.

Levi Yoder, our hero, is a young man who was originally Amish. Somehow (I guess it’s explained in the first novel in the series – this is the second) he got involved with the New York Mafia, which became a second family to him. He was even declared a “made man,” an “honor” usually restricted to Italians. Then he got cancer, but had an unexplained remission. After that, he grew stronger, faster, and was endowed with certain extra talents, like eidetic memory. He continues to work with the Mafia, but he’s allowed to do only jobs he wants to do. He has a sideline in rescuing young girls from human traffickers.

A request comes to his bosses from the Japanese Yakuza. One of their leaders has an American granddaughter, a little girl. She has been kidnapped. The grandfather has heard of Levi’s skills, and will be very generous if he can find and rescue the girl. Levi is happy to take on the job.

But then there’s an interruption. Levi is arrested and interrogated by the FBI. He’s rescued by a shadowy figure who says he works for an independent, non-government agency that fights human trafficking by any means necessary. They’ll help Levi if he’ll help them.

He also meets – and cooperates with – a Chinese double agent, a beautiful woman with a penchant for nudity and a phobia about being touched.

I think this is what’s known as a “high concept” story. It takes place in the real world, but has over-the-top elements. The plot rolls right along, dispensing lots of action and suspense, but for this reader it had a kind of a Hollywood, CGI feel. I should probably have approached it more as fantasy than as an ordinary mystery/thriller.

I also have to admit I have trouble with the depiction of Mafiosi as decent, honorable fellas. I believe that tradition is long past, and was grossly exaggerated even in the old days.

You may like the book, though. It certainly was entertaining. The Inside Man earns full marks as a page-turner.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Paris In the Present Tense,’ by Mark Helprin

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Music asked nothing, required nothing, needed nothing, betrayed nothing. It appeared instantly when called, even in memory. It was made of the ineffable magic in the empty spaces between – and the relation of – its otherwise unremarkable components.

“Wow,” I thought. “There’s a Mark Helprin novel I haven’t read yet.” A bargain deal had appeared, and I checked on Amazon and found I hadn’t bought it. So I did. Only then did I discover that I’d read Paris In the Present Tense before. I must have gotten a free review copy or something. However, I was only briefly discomfited by this. A Helprin novel always bears – and rewards – re-reading.

Jules Lacour is a septuagenarian Jewish music instructor in Paris. He is neither rich nor famous, though he is one of the geniuses of his generation – because this generation cares nothing for genius. But Jules has lived content with his art, except for missing his late wife.

But now his grandson has leukemia, and Jules wishes he had money to get him treatment. An offer from an American insurance conglomerate, to write them a signature tune, gives him brief hope, which they then dash callously.

So when Jules discovers that he has a previously undiagnosed brain aneurism that could kill him at any moment, he concocts a plan to make the company pay, and thereby to give his grandson a chance at life.

My big problem with Paris In the Present Time, you’ve probably guessed, is that our hero is an unapologetic fraudster. I don’t approve of fraud, no matter how bloated and greedy the target. However, that’s a question the book scarcely considers. The story is about love – Jules’ love for his parents, murdered by Nazis. His love for his wife, who died too soon. For his daughter and his grandchild. For a beautiful young student who is transparently smitten with him, and for a woman of more appropriate age whom he meets too late. But equally it’s about his love for Paris, and especially his love for music. The book is lush with gorgeous description and meditations on the meaning of it all. This is a book for reading slowly and savoring. It sweeps the reader into realms of transcendence.

Also, it meshed with – and helped to feed – my recent delusions of glimpsing some kind of Unified Theory of Existence. Helprin seems to have had some of the same thoughts I’ve had – maybe I stole some of them from him.

Insurance fraud aside, Paris In the Present Tense is a wonderful book. You ought to read it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Case of the Terrified Typist,’ by Erle Stanley Gardner

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Like every child of the 50s, I know Perry Mason in the form of Raymond Burr on TV. (I hated the show when my mother watched it, but now I find it quite delightful in reruns.) And I’ve read a couple of PM short stories over the years. But I’d never read a Perry Mason novel before. Critics indicate that Erle Stanley Gardner, the author, was not big on characterization, which usually means a book won’t be my kind of thing.

But I got a deal on The Case of the Terrified Typist and I tried it anyway. And you know what? I now know why the Perry Mason series was so popular. Gardner knew how to spin a tale.

Trial attorney Perry Mason has a big document that needs retyping, and his secretary Della Street is having trouble finding a competent typist. She calls an agency, but they can’t promise much. Then a woman shows up in their office and, asked if she’s the typist, she says yes. She turns out to be a whiz at it, and gets a lot of work done very quickly, very accurately. Then she disappears as mysteriously as she appeared.

When Perry and Della learn that the police are in the building, looking for a woman who robbed a diamond import business, they do a search and find a clump of chewing gun attached to the bottom of the typist’s desk. Inside that clump are valuable diamonds.

That’s the neat hook that opens The Case of the Terrified Typist. As the story proceeds, Perry will be hired to represent one of the diamond company’s employees against charges of murdering a diamond smuggler. Surprisingly, Hamilton Burger, the district attorney, chooses to bring murder charges without a body being found.

The whole story was complex, but it was also lively and suspenseful. I had a good time reading it. It made few demands and entertained me thoroughly. I just might read more Perry Mason.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Mysteries,’ by Graham Wilson

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Here’s the scenario: Jim, an Australian man, purchases a very old house in an out-of-the-way corner of Sidney. While doing renovations, he notices a basement concealed and sealed off beneath the floor of one room. He assumes this feature might have historical significance, so he notifies the government, which sends an assessor, a young woman, to look at it. To his astonishment, Jim discovers that this woman is his long-lost daughter, with whom his wife ran off long ago. Though he searched for them, he never found them, until now.

On top of that, they soon realize that the house he has purchased was built by an ancestor neither of them ever guessed they had.

If all this sounds a little far-fetched, I entirely agree. But it’s a tribute to the storytelling skills of Graham Wilson, author of The Mysteries, that I was entirely swept up in the book and overlooked its gross improbabilities.

We learn about Jim’s life and his struggles to rise from poverty. We learn of his ancestor Michael, who built the house – how he was transported as a convict from Ireland, served his time at hard labor, and built a semi-legal fortune along with his stone house. As his descendants discover his story, the reader learns it too.

I thought the story slowed somewhat toward the end, and perhaps too many details about Michael’s life come to light. But I read The Mysteries all the way through, and quite enjoyed it.

There were orthographic errors – word confusions, and sometimes quotation marks missing at the start of a paragraph. But I’ve seen far worse.

Sexual morality here is conventional contemporary, and attitudes toward Christianity tend to be critical, though few in number. Still, the storytelling was top-notch, and the book had undeniable charm. I do recommend it.