Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Whispering Smith,’ by Frank H. Spearman

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I grew curious about the character of Whispering Smith years back. I was reading a book about the Wild West, and the author mentioned, in an aside, that Smith was based – in part – on the real life lawman Joe Lefors. Lefors is best remembered nowadays as the faceless posseman in a straw boater who so spooks Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in the movie. In real life, alas, Joe Lefors was less of… well, of a force. He didn’t catch Butch and Sundance, after all, and his greatest achievement was extracting the confession that sent Tom Horn to the gallows for murder in 1903. Historians ever since have disputed the validity of that confession.

The same writer mentioned that the vicious killer Harvey DuSang in the novel is based on another Wild Bunch member, Harvey Logan (Kid Curry).

I first heard of Whispering Smith in a short-lived 1961 TV series that starred Audie Murphy. That series is notorious for being cited in a Senate Juvenile Delinquency Committee hearing as an egregious example of TV violence. The series actually bore almost no resemblance to the book, retaining the hero’s name and pretty much nothing else.

The series was loosely based on a 1948 movie (actually the last of several film adaptations) that starred Alan Ladd and Robert Preston. That movie was based on the book, though they moved it back in time (the novel is set around 1900, and everybody has telephones), and omitted a rather charming romantic subplot.

Having established that, let’s talk about the actual book, Whispering Smith, by Frank H. Spearman. It’s free for Kindle, so I thought that after all these years I’d find out what it was about. I had a pleasant surprise in store.

The story starts with a railroad foreman, Murray Sinclair, arriving at a wreck site to clear the track. He’s a well-paid and competent employee of the company, popular and efficient. But, we also learn, he’s pretty much a man without a conscience. We’d call him a sociopath today. He considers it one of his perks to plunder the wrecks. He’s caught at it by a railroad supervisor, and fired on the spot.

Sinclair withdraws along with his work crew, and becomes an outlaw, dynamiting and wrecking the trains he used to salvage. This causes the railroad president to call in his best detective, Gordon “Whispering” Smith.

Smith has been keeping away from that particular area for some time, out of consideration for a resident of the town. Marion Sinclair is Smith’s old flame, but she married his childhood friend Murray Sinclair. She’s learned Murray’s true character by now and has separated from him, but (in one of those plot points that would be incomprehensible to today’s reader) they both respect the sanctity of marriage and wouldn’t dream of committing adultery together.

But Sinclair is too proud to run, and Smith has principles about doing his job, so their final showdown is inevitable.

When I started reading Whispering Smith, it seemed to me a pretty standard old-fashioned novel. The prose was a little more florid than what we prefer today, and the dialogue doubtlessly bowdlerized. But the more I read, the more I got caught up in the story. The characters are exceedingly well done, especially that of Smith himself. He’s one of those seemingly ordinary men who reveals increasingly intriguing depths.

Everything surprised Whispering Smith, even his salary; but an important consequence was that nothing excited him.

I truly enjoyed Whispering Smith, and I recommend it heartily.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Calendar of Crime,’ by Ellery Queen

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Miss Ypson had not always been dead; au contraire. She had lived for seventy-eight years, for most of them breathing hard. As her father used to remark, “She was a very active little verb.” Miss Ypson’s father was a professor of Greek at a small Midwestern university. He had conjugated his daughter with the rather bewildered assistance of one of his brawnier students, an Iowa poultry heiress.

I think I’ve intimated before that I’m adopting a policy of withdrawing – a bit – from contemporary fiction. We find ourselves in a new Victorian era, where quite a lot of things that are true can’t be said in polite company, and where every story is expected to genuflect, at least for a moment, toward the altar of the accepted pieties. It’s all very boring and annoying, and I need to stretch my legs on older, more gracious paths from time to time.

So I’m going to be checking out some literature of the past. As my tastes run to mysteries, that necessarily involves what’s called the stories of the Golden Age. Which will involve acquiring some new tastes. Golden Age mysteries are primarily puzzle stories, and that approach doesn’t excite me much. I like my stories character driven.

I downloaded Ellery Queen’s Calendar of Crime. Published in 1952, it’s not strictly a Golden Age book, but the approach is pretty much the same. It’s not a novel but a short story collection. The “calendar” of the title means that each of the twelve stories is set, chronologically and thematically, in a particular month of the year. The January story involves a New Year’s Eve party; the February story involves a legend about George Washington, etc. The main character, of course, is Ellery Queen, a sophisticated New York amateur detective whose father happens to be a police inspector.

It’s a good collection. The puzzles are clever, and the writing (by Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, who wrote under the Ellery Queen name) can be quite elegant, as witness the excerpt at the top of this review. These are puzzle stories, not character stories, but within the bounds of the form the authors did a good job of making them relatively plausible.

I’ll say this, though. Never hire Ellery Queen to protect either your life or your property. He will always fail, because if he succeeded there’d be no mystery for him to solve.

No cautions whatever are necessary for questionable content. As some mystery fan once said, “I like a good murder, without any immorality in it.”

Fiction, Reviews

‘All Lies,’ by Andrew Cunningham

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I don’t have a sophisticated grading system for novels, like five stars or three thumbs (or noses) up. I should probably develop one. I generally just group them loosely into three categories: “I hated it and didn’t finish it,” “I liked it enough to finish it, but probably won’t look for another book by the same author,” and “I loved it.”

All Lies sits solidly in the middle category. I was interested enough to finish it, but I wasn’t much impressed with the writing. Author Cunningham has good instincts, I think, but he needs to work on his craftsmanship.

The story is told by the main character, Del Hunnicutt. Del’s first words quote his father’s dying declaration: “I come from a long line of idiots…”

Through the course of the story, Del learns things he never knew about his grandfather, who was idiot enough to get involved in an art heist, and then died in a bomber during World War II. He goes out on a date arranged through a computer matching service, and his match turns out to be a descendent of one of his grandfather’s criminal associates. She manipulated their meeting in order to find out what he knew about the “treasure” the gang was supposed to have left behind, a treasure Del has never heard of.

The next day his date is murdered, but he is soon approached by the woman’s sister, Sabrina, a much more appealing and (seemingly) trustworthy person. Together they set out to get ahold of a lost painting, said to contain the secret to finding the treasure. It turns out they’re not the only people looking for that painting, and things get messy.

As I said, the story was interesting enough to keep me reading, though I thought the writing unpolished. The characters’ actions don’t always seem logical in terms of their personalities. And sometimes the prose was very amateurish: “It was going to be a while before we would be able to accurately describe the uniqueness of what we had just experienced.” Nor did the logic of the story always work, as when we’re told that criminals couldn’t sell certain precious objects they had stolen because nobody had any money in the Great Depression.

But I did finish the book, which is better than a lot of self-published novels do with me. So I give it a moderate recommendation. There weren’t any overly objectionable adult themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Ashley Bell,’ by Dean Koontz

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A relaxing massage, and then chardonnay and a silly-fun session of divination, and the next thing you know, you’ve attracted the attention of an incarnation of Hitler, and you’ve invited occult forces into your life, and you’ve been spared from cancer only so that some lunatic can stab you to death with a thousand pencils.

One of the joys of being a Dean Koontz fan is the many surprises he offers. Not for him the comfortable formulas that endear us to other authors (often providing considerable legitimate pleasures). Koontz keeps trying new things. With the exception of a very few series books, such as the Odd Thomas adventures, Koontz keeps tricking us – except that you can almost count on some kind of supernatural dog somewhere in his recent works.

The heroine of Ashley Bell is not the titular character, but a young California woman named Bibi Blair. Beautiful, a superior surfer, engaged to a military hero, her career goal is to be a famous author, and she’s made fair progress in that direction.

And then one day her arm starts feeling funny, and the doctor informs her she has a rare brain cancer. Inoperable and 100% fatal.

Bibi is a fighter. She refuses to give up. She announces that she will fight this thing and win.

That very night, she has a vision, and is healed.

The next day, to celebrate, her hippie parents give her the gift of a massage and a psychic reading. The psychic tells her her life has been spared for a reason. The reason, she divines, is to save the life of a young girl. The girl’s name is Ashley Bell.

Bibi takes the message seriously. She sets out to find Ashley Bell, and finds herself the target of a sinister cult devoted to human sacrifice.

The story starts strange, and gets stranger and stranger. Then, around the half-way point, Koontz blindsides the reader, and it becomes a very different kind of story. I won’t spoil the twist for you, but it’s pretty neat.

I’m not sure that the ending of Ashley Bell is quite worthy of the skillful storytelling that kept me riveted up to that point. But I’m not sure it’s not, either.

I do know it was like no other book I’ve read, and I wouldn’t have missed it.

Highly recommended. Mild cautions for adult themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Short Drop,’ by Matthew FitzSimmons

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Matthew FitzSimmons is a new author, and he seems to have hit a home run with his first novel, a mystery/thriller entitled The Short Drop.

The story’s hero is Gibson Vaughn, a young man with world-class potential who’s the victim of his own indiscretions. Years ago he was briefly famous when he hacked into the computers of a prominent senator, Benjamin Lombard, uncovering evidence of malfeasance. The whole thing blew up on him when further investigation revealed that the actual author of the malfeasance was Gibson’s father, the senator’s chief aid. Gibson’s father committed suicide, and Gibson himself barely escaped prison when he was allowed to enlist in the marines. On leaving the service Gibson learned that the senator, now Vice President, has neither forgotten nor forgiven. In spite of his skills, Gibson is unhireable.

Then he gets an offer from a security company to do a short-term hacking job. In spite of his desperation, he almost says no, because the head of the company is a man who used to work for Sen. Lombard. He played a major role in prosecuting Gibson. But Gibson changes his mind when he learns the purpose of the investigation. They’re trying to find out what happened to Suzanne Lombard, the senator’s daughter. She was like a sister to Gibson, and she disappeared as a teenager while Gibson was in jail awaiting trial. He joins the team to work with a male/female pair of operatives, and gets involved more deeply than anybody planned.

The story that follows must have been a nightmare to outline. Surprise follows surprise, good guys and bad guys change places, people die unexpectedly, and the plot twists around like a politician’s principles. The tension never lets up.

Highly recommended, with the usual cautions.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Laurus,’ by Eugene Vodolazkin

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Angels do not tire, said the Angel, because they do not scrimp on their strength. If you are not thinking about the finiteness of your strength, you will not tire, either. Know, O Arseny, that only he who does not fear drowning is capable of walking on water.

My friend Dale Nelson recently recommended this newly translated Russian novel to me. It sounded intriguing, so I read it. The book was Laurus, by Eugene Vodolazkin, a novel unlike any other I’ve read – and I expect you’ll feel the same.

On the surface, Laurus is a simple modern version of a traditional hagiography, a saint’s life. Arseny is an orphan born in 15th Century Russia. He is raised by his grandfather, an herbalist healer. Arseny becomes an herbalist too, and eventually surpasses his teacher. He gradually realizes that the herbs he uses are almost irrelevant; God has placed healing power in his hands.

But Arseny commits a great sin, which fills him with guilt. His whole life, and the course of his story, are afterward dominated by his passion to somehow do penance and gain salvation, if not for himself, at least for the ones he hurt. From being a renowned and revered healer he descends into amnesia, wandering in poverty as a “holy fool.” Then he becomes a pilgrim, on the road to Jerusalem. On that journey he meets an Italian friend, Ambroggio. Ambroggio is devoted to studying the problem of the nature of time – this is dramatized by the fact that he wholly believes that the world will end in 1492, but at the same time often has visions of events centuries beyond his time. He sees no contradiction in this.

After his pilgrimage, Arseny returns to Russia and becomes a monk, and then retires to the life of a solitary hermit (that’s where he is given the name “Laurus,” the last of several names he bears in his life). He dies very near the place he was born, reliving, in a higher key, the crisis of his early life.

Laurus is an eccentric book which operates on a number of levels. As in a medieval book, dialogue is not indicated by quotation marks. You have to figure out where characters’ speeches start. You might call the book Christian fantasy, but there are also elements of science fiction – speculation on the nature of time is central to the whole thing. Arseny doesn’t experience his life quite in sequence, and there are anachronisms – like plastic water bottles lying as litter in a medieval forest – that have been put there for a reason.

Theologically, Protestants like me aren’t going to be entirely satisfied with the story. The doctrine here seems to be that grace is not free – at least for great sins, one must first show penitence through costly sacrifices, and then – if God is convinced of one’s repentance – forgiveness may be granted. Arseny suffers greatly to serve others, denies himself about as much as is physically possible, works miracles, and yet is never sure of his salvation.

But that’s probably (I don’t know for sure) true to Orthodox theology, and so makes the book historically authentic. It’s certainly a moving story, though it can also be quite funny. The translation by Lisa C. Hayden is highly readable.

There’s some disturbing material, but nothing that should offend the average Christian reader. I recommend Laurus. It would reward repeated readings.

Reviews

Netflix review: ‘River’

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I meant to review a book tonight, but then I’d need to link to Amazon. And Amazon appears to be a victim of its own success, crushed under the weight of Cyber Monday business. So I’ll talk about a Netflix series I watched.

River is a British series which mixes English police procedural with Scandinavian depression porn, along with a strong dose of the metaphysical. Over the years we’ve seen neurotic detectives, addicted detectives, disabled detectives, etc., etc. Now we have a delusional detective.

John River (Stellan Skarsgård) is a London police detective, a Swedish immigrant (which is odd, because River isn’t a Swedish name). He is tormented, not only by his persistent delusion that he sees and converses with dead people (he knows it’s a delusion because he doesn’t believe in life after death) but by the recent death of his partner, “Stevie” Stevenson (Nicola Walker). She was killed by a drive-by shooter, right in front of him.

River, because of his delusions, often asks in bizarre ways. This makes his colleagues wary of him and makes him insecure. He’s supposed to be seeing a counselor, but resists opening up to her. He is constantly in conflict with his superiors and skates on the edge of losing his job.

The series wasn’t bad, but in spite of its unusual qualities I found it kind of predictable. I asked myself, “Who would you guess, of all these characters, the writers hate most?” I selected one, and figured that person would be the killer, and I was essentially right.

An interesting series. Pretty grim. It provides the unusual spectacle (for television) of a romance between two characters who aren’t particularly attractive. I neither loved nor hated it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Trent’s Last Case,’ by E. C. Bentley

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I’ll bellyache about my developing self-exile from all popular culture in another post. Suffice it to say, just now, that I’m thinking about trying to find good mystery stories from the past to read. In that spirit, I bought E. C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case, one of the groundbreaking novels in the genre.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley has the distinction, not only of being the author of some seminal mysteries, but of inventing a form of light verse, a sort of short-cut limerick called the Clerihew. Here’s one of the more successful ones:

“The mustache on Hitler
Could hardly be littler,”
Was the thought that kept recurring
To Field Marshall Goehring.

On top of that he was a childhood schoolfellow and lifelong friend of G. K. Chesterton. So he comes highly recommended.

His novel, Trent’s Last Case, published in 1913, stars Philip Trent, a young artist who doubles as a crime reporter for a London newspaper. He is sent to a country estate in the wake of the murder of its owner, a predatory American financier. Faced with a confusing scenario – why was the victim dressed in mismatched clothes, and missing his false teeth? – he finally comes to a conclusion about whodunnit – which he suppresses for private reasons. But that’s only half the book. The second part involves a series of further revelations that confound all his conclusions.

It’s a clever book, in the English tradition (later established in the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction”) of the “cozy” puzzle mystery. But honestly, it’s all a little too clever for me. In order to fool the reader, the author (it seems to me) pushes and crosses the bounds of plausibility. He works hard to make it all seem consistent with real human nature, but he does not entirely succeed – in my view.

Also, the prose style somewhat irritated me. Granted the author lived before Hemingway, but when he gives us a short biography of each major character on their first appearance in the story, rather than showing us what they’re like through their words and actions, it seems like lazy writing to me. I mean, Conan Doyle was considerably older than Bentley, but he knew how to reveal a character.

I can’t condemn Trent’s Last Case – it’s an acknowledged classic. But for me it didn’t work very well. Your mileage will likely vary.

On the bright side, no content cautions at all are necessary.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Greater Trumps,’ by Charles Williams

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Back in the 1970s, in the flush of an upsurge of interest in C. S. Lewis and the Inklings, Eerdmans Publishers brought out American editions of Charles Williams’ novels. One that came later than the others and (if my perceptions were correct) did not stay in print long, was The Greater Trumps. Williams is not a writer for everyone, and this book in particular was especially unsuited for Eerdmans’ market. I borrowed it from a friend and read it at the time. I recalled it over the years with bemusement and some affection. Recently I acquired a complete Kindle edition of all Williams’ novels (which oddly seems to have now disappeared from Amazon), and read it again. My reaction is mixed.

Prof. Bruce Charlton, of the invaluable The Notion Club Papers blog, has been posting about Williams quite a lot recently, and has brought out some information that was not well known in the past – even, apparently, to Lewis himself. Charles Williams was not the saintly, highly spiritual character his friends thought he was. Without judging his salvation, he seems to have carelessly crossed a number of moral and theological lines. He was serially unfaithful to his wife, and he dabbled in the occult. And that’s where the first, obvious problem with The Greater Trumps makes itself apparent. The Greater Trumps is a Christian fantasy centered on the Tarot, the occult system of fortunetelling through cards.

Mr. Coningsby (his given name, to his lifelong distress, is Lothair) is a Commissioner in Lunacy – if I understand correctly, that is a civil service position delegated to evaluate the competence of people in the commitment process. He is a stuffy and unimaginative man, but not malicious. He has a sister, Sibyl, a middle-aged maiden lady who long ago renounced the flesh and devoted herself to loving everyone and everything around her, as expressions of the great Love (that is, of God). He also has a daughter, Nancy, who recently become engaged to a strange young man named Henry Lee. Henry is descended from Gypsies (spelled “Gipsies” here), and – although he genuinely loves Nancy – he has an ulterior motive in their relationship. Mr. Coningsby recently inherited, from a friend, a valuable collection of antique playing cards. Among these packs, unknown to him or to anyone except for certain Gypsies, is the very first, original Tarot pack. This pack was created by a great mystic ages ago, and partakes of the very nature of the universe itself, along with the mystical powers that control it. For that reason, the cards not only can tell the future, but can be used as magical talismans to manipulate nature. Continue reading ‘The Greater Trumps,’ by Charles Williams →

Reviews, Uncategorized

Bye bye, ‘Murdoch’

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A little while back I told you how much I was enjoying the Canadian police series, Murdoch Mysteries, on Netflix. I spoke a few days too soon.

To be fair, the series, set in 1890s Toronto, had always reserved the right, not only to resonate with contemporary life but to comment on contemporary issues. One of the first episodes involved homosexuality, and they were not shy about making statements about sexism and racism (one episode had Murdoch himself experiencing anti-Catholic prejudice). Particularly troubling was a story line that had Murdoch and Dr. Ogden, the pathologist he loves, driven apart by a difference over abortion (they later resolved that by papering it over, having Murdoch simply say, “I care nothing about that”).

But they really let themselves go in the fifth season. I think it may be former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s fault. According to Wikipedia, the conservative PM let it be known he was a fan of the show, which must have surely caused the whole staff considerable embarrassment. Worse than that, he visited the set while the fourth season was filming, and they somehow they ended up adding a scene where Harper, playing a dim policeman, arrests the TV version of the prime minister by accident. Great joke – the stupid Conservative is too dumb to know what a real PM looks like, let alone be one.

Still, they must have felt the stigma of Harper’s approval, because during season five they seem to have pulled the political stops out. The first episode featured a famous socialist, Jack London. The second episode featured a saintly portrayal of noted anarchist Emma Goldman. In this episode, there is fear of a terrorist bombing, but – wouldn’t you know it – the terrorists are purely imaginary. It was all set up by an agent provocateur working for the US government. This episode also gave Inspector Brackenreid an opportunity to express his utter contempt for all Americans in an earthy fashion.

I watched a couple more episodes, hoping that once they’d got that out of their systems they’d go back to entertaining. But I found I’d lost my enthusiasm. I meant to watch yet another episode, but somehow… I found that a day had gone by, then three days, then a week, then a couple weeks. I just didn’t care anymore. Especially since I know from the Wikipedia page that Dr. Ogden will get involved in the birth control movement. Maybe they’ll even bring in the saintly Margaret Sanger, who will conveniently fail to mention her views on racial eugenics.

I’ll never know. I’m done. It was fun while it lasted.