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Two TV shows about one-armed men

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The most famous one-armed man in television history is, of course, the murderer hunted by Dr. Richard Kimball on The Fugitive. But I don’t have him in mind in this post. I never actually watched The Fugitive much.

But I have fond memories of two television series from my childhood, each of whose main characters had one arm. Why one-armed characters resonate with me, I cannot say. The reasons are probably emotionally complex and embarrassing (I had one character lose a hand in my novel Wolf Time, and another lose a whole arm in Troll Valley). But I’m delighted that YouTube has made it possible to rediscover these series, at least in part. My viewing report follows.

The Vise

The character of detective Mark Saber had an interesting evolution. According to my internet research (not always coherent), he began as a British detective working (for some reason) on the police force of a large American city on an early US TV series called Mystery Theater. He was played by Tom Conway (not to be confused with comedian Tim Conway). Tom Conway was the brother of famous movie heavy George Sanders, and spent his career in his brother’s shadow. His character dressed nattily, and (judging by the one episode I found on YouTube) fought crime more with fisticuffs than with deduction or forensics.

The show ran from 1951-1954. Then in 1955 the character was resurrected back in the old home country in a new series called The Vise. Mark Saber was now a London private investigator, and was now played by Donald Gray, a native of South Africa who lost his left arm in France in World War II. I’ve only found a couple episodes of this series on YouTube. Here’s one:

Continue reading Two TV shows about one-armed men →

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Murderer’s Daughter,’ by Jonathan Kellerman

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Tragic; could you blame a boy for going bad? You sure could. Turning the tale over and over, Grace found herself growing steely. She knew all about rejection and loss, deep wounds of the soul that required psychic excavation and cauterization, the acid wash of self-examination. Life could be a horror. No excuse.

It occurred me after I finished reading Jonathan Kellerman’s The Murderer’s Daughter that the heroine could be described as a sort of American version of Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander, main character of his “The Girl” novels, but without the annoying Marxist themes. I’m OK with that. Grace Blades is a vivid character. I generally avoid novels with female protagonists because I can’t identify with them, but I was all in for Grace from the first paragraph.

Grace Blades (isn’t that a great name?) is a genius, off the charts, and a world-renowned clinical psychologist. She is especially famous for her successful work with trauma victims. Yet oddly, her own psychological world is rather barren.

Grace was born to a neglectful, abusive home, and orphaned at an early age. After that she entered the foster care system, until she found a loving home with a couple who cared for her and nurtured her intellectual gifts. Since their deaths, Grace has kept other people at a distance, confining her sex life to occasional anonymous encounters with strangers.

But one day she opens her office door to a new patient, and sees before her a man she had a tryst with just the night before. She tries to salvage the session, but the man flees at last, hinting at family guilt and something about atonement.

Soon Grace learns that this man was not in fact a stranger at all, but a fellow witness to the most traumatic event of her life. And now Grace is in danger from the person that man feared.

Grace does not take danger passively. Her rule is to go on the offensive. And so she does.

The Murderer’s Daughter is quite unlike Kellerman’s Alex Delaware novels. Alex is well-adjusted, and has a productive relationship with the police. Grace Blades is more like Batman, a law unto herself, a genius with fighting skills who takes the law into her own hands.

Morally, I disapprove. As a reader, I loved this book. Cautions for language, sex, and violence.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Dregs of Aquarius,’ by Rick Dewhurst

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I have a strange reader’s relationship with Rick Dewhurst. My limited, personal online contact with him, as well as my reading of his work, suggests to me that he’s a good guy, a good pastor, and a good writer. Yet I’ve had trouble with his novels. I reviewed his novel Bye Bye Bertie, a satire of evangelical culture presented as a mystery story, and had difficulty seeing the point (I suppose that may mean I’m just the kind of Christian he’s lampooning). His novel The Darkest Valley, which I also reviewed, was a story of a failed ministry. It was far more accessible to me, but kind of a polar opposite of the first book – so realistic and tragic that I had a hard time dealing with it.

His new novel, The Dregs of Aquarius, falls somewhere in between. I think it’s far more successful as a novel, and has the further advantage of being hilarious in parts.

Tom Pollard, the main character, is a hippie in a small British Columbia town, (apparently) sometime in the 1970s. He has a job as a bartender, but his life centers on his circle of stoner friends, some of them American draft dodgers, with whom he regularly gets drunk and high. What seems to him a pretty idyllic existence is marred only by two things – as a result of a head injury, he has recently begun to see spiritual beings, whom he thinks of as gods, hovering in the sky. And his girlfriend Ruby, whom he cares for more than he’s willing to admit, is showing signs of being drawn back to “straight” life, and has gone home to spend time with her parents.

She didn’t really want to control me. She only wanted a real person to relate to, and I didn’t want to be one. But then why would I want to define myself or be defined. I knew that if you began to coalesce around a solid identity, there was a good chance you might be held accountable.

Tom’s adventures climax in a marathon “encounter session” (you’ll remember what those were if you’re old enough) that’s as good an example of escalating slapstick as I’ve ever encountered in a book.

I had a little trouble with the ending of the story, but not because I thought it was badly done or inappropriate. On the contrary, it’s exactly the kind of payoff you look for in a Christian novel. It just struck me as oddly… conventional in a book this eccentric.

But maybe that was the point.

It’s also a little jarring that the main characters of this funny book, Tom and Ruby, are the same people as the pastor and his wife who suffer so in The Darkest Valley. It’s a strange juxtaposition, though I suppose there may be a larger purpose.

In any case, I can recommend The Dregs of Aquarius. Not perfect, but a rare example of a Christian comic novel that works. Also a pretty good evocation of a time which (thankfully) has passed forever. Let’s hope.

Fiction, Reviews

‘What Dies in Summer,’ and ‘BlackBird,’ by Tom Wright

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I had trouble making up my mind about reviewing these two remarkable novels. I liked them, but didn’t entirely approve of them. But they didn’t offend me either. I guess I’ll just describe them and let you draw your own conclusions.

What Dies in Summer and Blackbird, by Tom Wright are connected novels, with the same main characters, but there’s enough separation to make them very distinct; not quite a series.

The central characters are Jim “Biscuit” Bonham, a teenager in Dallas in What Dies in Summer, and his cousin Lou Ann (“L.A.”), who comes to live with him and his grandmother. The two cousins are children of sisters who are both alcoholic, and are no longer able to live with their parents.

They’re poor, and you might almost describe them as “white trash,” except that their grandmother is a smart and good woman, determined to see that they grow up loved and well educated. They are both unusually intelligent, though Jim doesn’t believe it of himself.

Their story moves out of soap opera territory when, one day, out hunting returnable bottles, Jim and L.A. discover a murder victim – a girl their own age, raped, strangled, and left naked.

Two kids this smart can’t stay out of the investigation, and their inquiries bring them into serious danger from a surprising quarter. Continue reading ‘What Dies in Summer,’ and ‘BlackBird,’ by Tom Wright →

Fiction, Reviews

‘I, Ripper,’ by Stephen Hunter

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Stephen Hunter, after years of writing successful sniper novels, has taken a flyer with a change of genre—a historical thriller. I, Ripper is a fictional retelling of the Jack the Ripper murders which is not intended to solve the historical mystery, but to illuminate the history of modern ideas.

The story is told through the eyes of three characters. One is a young London reporter who calls himself “Jeb” (we don’t learn his true identity until late in the story). By luck he’s the first newspaper man on the scene of the initial prostitute murder in Whitechapel, and he becomes his paper’s chief man on the story. He even bestows on the murderer the nickname by which he’ll be known to history.

The other narrators are the Ripper himself, in a fictional journal in which he does not reveal his identity, and a young prostitute who describes in a series of letters how she and her fellow streetwalkers react to the killings.

Jeb wants to do more to uncover the killer, in the absence of effective work by the official police. He makes the acquaintance of a renowned linguistics scholar, who produces what today we’d call a “profile” of the killer. Armed with this profile, Jeb and the professor reduce the pool of suspects to a few men, and then one.

Then the investigation explodes in surprises and a dramatic confrontation.

I, Ripper isn’t a bad novel on its own terms. I found it difficult to read at the beginning, because the murders are described in unpleasant detail. The final working out of the story was much to my liking, however.

But I don’t think I can recommend it to our audience, unless you have a strong stomach.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Flashback,’ by Dan Simmons

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It was a spooky experience, reading this book. Not because of its inherent scariness (though there’s plenty of that), but because I started reading Flashback just about the time President Obama signed his nuclear arms deal with Iran, and finished it in the aftermath of the Chattanooga terrorist killings.

Both events resonated with this story.

In the world of Flashback (which might be compared to the world I envision at the end of my novel Death’s Doors, but more fully realized), the United States still exists, but barely. Texas has seceded, and the Nuevo Mexican Reconquista has torn away other southwestern states. Order in the US is maintained by several Japanese corporations, and American soldiers fight as mercenaries in various world conflicts, the major source of what’s left of US federal revenue. Israel no longer exists, and the Islamic Caliphate is on the march world-wide.

Most Americans don’t even care. They are addicted to a new drug called Flashback, which enables its users to experience their happiest memories in full detail.

Nick Bottom (same name as the character in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream), is a Flashback addict. He will lie, steal, and betray his friends in order to get a little more of the drug, so he can spend time again with his beloved wife.

He used to be a top detective with the Denver police department, but after his wife’s death he descended into addiction, sending his young son to live with a grandfather in Los Angeles.

Then one day he gets an offer too good to refuse. The Japanese “protector” of Denver promises to pay him well to learn who murdered his own son several years ago. At first Nick, junky that he is, tries to take the money, buy Flashback, and hide away, but these people are smarter than he is. Eventually he begins to take a real interest in the mystery. Then he discovers the puzzle is closer to home than he imagined. Then he begins to care about other people, including the son he abandoned.

Flashback is a long book, but it sucked me in. It’s splendidly crafted, with artful allusions and foreshadowings. It provides a frightening picture of the near future that’s all the more disturbing for its plausibility. And there’s a twist at the end that genuinely scared me.

Cautions are in order, mostly for language and violence. It’s a peculiarity of this book that Christianity seems hardly to exist anymore. I sometimes wondered if the Rapture had happened, but I saw no hint that author Simmons had that in mind.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Gutshot Straight,’ by Lou Berney

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Shake wondered how long before they opened a Vegas-themed hotel and casino that was an exact replica of the city around it, including a replica of the Vegas-themed hotel itself, and so on down to microscopic infinity.

Impressed as I was by Lou Berney’s The Long and Faraway Gone, which I reviewed a few inches below, I wondered how much I’d like Gutshot Straight, his first novel, which was advertised as a comic crime story.

I liked it enough to laugh out loud more than once while reading it – in a restaurant – something that hasn’t happened to me in years.

Charles “Shake” Bouchon, the main character of the novels, is just finishing up a prison stretch for Grand Theft auto when we first meet him. He’s an accomplished “wheel man,” a getaway driver. But he’s decided he’s getting too old for that sort of thing. It’s a sucker’s game. He wants to go straight. Open a restaurant, if he can.

But when an old friend, the beautiful head of the Los Angeles Armenian mob, asks him to do an “easy” job for her, he figures what can it hurt? He can use the money. All he has to do is drive a car to a particular address in Las Vegas, and deliver a briefcase to the man who’ll meet him there.

You won’t be surprised to learn that it turns out a lot more complicated than that. Shake finds himself in a situation where he has the choice of looking the other way, or saving a life. He saves the life, and then the fun begins.

The action centers around a bogus religious relic (I won’t spoil the fun by telling you what it is), which is no less precious, thanks to its mere age, for being a fraud (I assumed author Berney had invented it, but apparently it actually exists, or did exist). All kinds of bad people are hunting for it, and they covet it enough to torture and kill to get it.

Doesn’t sound like a comic novel? Well, it’s all in the presentation. Years ago people recommended the author Elmore Leonard to me, based largely on his sharp dialogue. But I never warmed to Leonard. He’s a cold-blooded writer (or so I perceive him). I don’t care about his characters.

Gutshot Straight is kind of like Elmore Leonard by way of P. G. Wodehouse. I don’t mean the inimitable Wodehouse diction, which wouldn’t work here, but the Wodehouse kind of story. Where some dim young man is pressured or blackmailed into kidnapping a pig or stealing a silver cow creamer, and only manages to carry the job through because he’s surrounded by idiots and lunatics, running around like characters in a French farce. The chief female character and love interest in this book is right out of Wodehouse – a spunky, fearless, utterly amoral female dynamo who knocks Shake for a loop. And one character in the second book, Whiplash River (which I’m still enjoying reading), “Harry” the retired Cold War spook, is essentially Uncle Fred with a gun.

And the presentation is in no way cold-blooded. Berney excels at treating characters, even sociopathic ones, in three-dimensional ways.

I never wanted this book to end. The publisher charges too much for it, even in the Kindle edition, but I wouldn’t have missed it.

Cautions for language and violence.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Long and Faraway Gone,’ by Lou Berney

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The past had power. The past was a riptide. That’s why, if you had a brain in your head, you didn’t go in the water.

Ring the steeple bells! Festoon the festal bunting! Declare a bank holiday! Lars has discovered a new favorite author!

I’d never head of Lou Berney before. I think I downloaded The Long and Faraway Gone because they offered a deal for the Kindle version. But you can now list me among this guy’s faithful fans. I wish he had more published novels to date.

At first glance, The Long and Faraway Gone is simply a superior example of a subgenre that appeals to me (though frequently disappointing), what I might call the “personal cold case” story, where someone investigates a crime that touched them long ago, discovering the ways in which memory (and people, including oneself) mislead and lie.

But author Berney takes a fresh approach from the beginning – this is a two-strand story, concerning two separate murders connected only by general location and date. The two narratives run parallel through the course of the book, only brushing against each other in passing.

One strand centers on Las Vegas private detective Wyatt Rivers. He agrees to do a favor for a friend – fly to Omaha for one day to help a friend who runs a music club, who’s been plagued by acts of vandalism. Only – oh, wait – it’s not Omaha. It’s Oklahoma City. Wyatt, who has already agreed to the favor, is dismayed. Oklahoma City is the one place in the world he doesn’t want to go. Because years back, when he was a teenager and had a different name, he was one of a group of employees herded into the projection room of a small movie theater. The robbers shot them all to death – except for Wyatt. Ever since that night, he’s been living with survivor’s guilt, the memory of the girlfriend who was killed, and the obsessive question – “Why me? Why did they spare my life?”

Julianna Rosales’ life changed that same summer, at the Oklahoma State Fair, when she was only six years old. Her beautiful older sister, Genevieve, had left her alone “for just fifteen minutes” while she went to try to score some cocaine, and vanished from the face of the earth. Since then Julianna has lived without close relationships, or any purpose other than discovering the truth about Genevieve. An old photo posted on Facebook leads her to a string of new clues, and into great danger.

We follow these two wounded people as they turn over the stones of their pasts and learn that memory is fallible, and people are not always what you think they are – for better and for worse.

I enjoyed this novel immensely. The writing was flawless, the dialogue and characterization sharp and textured and layered, the plot resolutions believable. There’s great humanity, and great human compassion, in Lou Berney’s writing.

I think you could even make an argument for a kind of Christian subtext. The self-identified Christians who occasionally show up in the story can be silly, but are generally well-meaning, though the chief Christian character, for some reason, uses the “f” word a lot.

Some rough language, as you’ve already guessed from the paragraph above, and “adult” themes. But on its merits I recommend this book highly. One of the very best I’ve read recently.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Mercy of the Night,’ by David Corbett

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Simply because it provided me with a novel reading experience, I need to review David Corbett’s The Mercy of the Night. You may or may not want to read it yourself, but if you do, I think you’ll remember it.

Whether that’s a good thing or not, you’ll have to decide for yourself.

The story, set in a bankrupt, economically distressed small city in northern California, focuses on two troubled souls.

One is Jacqui Garza, a young prostitute, recently escaped from a court-ordered halfway house program. Ten years ago, Jacqui was a celebrity. She had been kidnapped by a sexual predator, but managed to get free. Yet in a sense she never got away at all. Now she’s a witness in a murder, sought by the police and the killers both.

The other is Phelan Tierney, a widower and suspended lawyer working as an investigator. He volunteers as a tutor at the halfway house, and is desperately trying to find Jacqui. Among all the girls he tutored, she showed the greatest promise, but also seemed the most lost. He’s become obsessed with her, to the point where it threatens his relationship with his girlfriend.

Though there are those who wish to harm Jacqui, her greatest enemy is herself, her conviction that she deserves nothing good, and will never get anything good.

The Mercy of the Night is a very well-written book, with excellent characters and dialogue (the climax, I think, was a little rote, but not excessively so). But what struck me most in my reading was that I found the book impossible to enjoy. The miasma of failure and doom that hangs over the gray town is palpable in every line. I was certain as I read that this whole thing could only turn out badly.

In fact (small spoiler here), it didn’t end up quite as badly as I feared. But I’m not sure the author intended the book to be as hard to read as it is, from an emotional point of view. I nearly put it down more than once, out of simple dread. (Your mileage, of course, may vary.)

But it’s a well-constructed and well-realized novel. Cautions for violence, moderately explicit sex scenes, and lots of profanity. There seems to be a theological subtext, but it’s postmodernist.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Black,’ and ‘Black is Back,’ by Russell Blake

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When I started reading the first book in Russell Blake’s detective series, Black, I was frankly not much impressed. The main character and his situation seemed hackneyed and glib. But I gave it a chance, and soon decided that there’s a whole lot more going on with these books than was initially apparent, and now I’m a fan.

Artemus Black (he tries to avoid his first name) is a low rent PI in the stereotypical shabby Los Angeles office. He has an office assistant, Roxie, a hot goth chick with superior research and hacking skills, who is reliably insolent to him. He also has an obese, rescued “office cat,” who hates him. He’s seeing a psychologist to help him work through his anger issues – anger at his hippie parents who, although stoned most of the time, keep turning their arts and crafts into wildly profitable businesses, and at his ex-wife who, back when he was a rock musician, recorded an album of songs he wrote and then left him to become an international star, taking all the song rights with her. He drives a classic Cadillac El Dorado convertible, and wears 1940s suits and fedoras. He drinks too much and is trying to quit smoking.

The first book is simply called Black, and involves Black being hired by an aging action movie star with a particular hatred for the paparazzi. Now paparazzi are getting murdered wherever the star goes, and suspicion is being directed at him.

The second book, Black is Back, deals with murder in the rap music scene.

What’s best about the Black books is the characters and the dialogue. Black’s arguments with Roxie are masterpieces of emotional manipulation and veiled sexual tension. His dialogues with his cop friend, Stan Colt, are just hilarious guy talk – cross-chat that’s never been done better in print.

There are some surprisingly beautiful descriptive passages. Russell Blake is an excellent writer. Also some moments when Black exhibits some pretty solid moral sense.

Highly recommended. Cautions for violence, language, and adult stuff, but not really very heavy.