An intriguing premise: On his way to conquer England by way of York in 1066, King Harald Hardrada of Norway secretly buried a great treasure in a ruined Saxon church. Some time later, the church was rebuilt without the treasure being discovered. Only now, in the post-Christian present when the church is falling down again, a priest accidentally finds the secret vault where the treasure lies. Once he informs the authorities, his church becomes the target, first of ordinary thieves, and then of right-wing, racist political extremists. So a Norwegian agent is assigned to infiltrate the conspiracy and sabotage it.

Hardrada’s Hoard could have been a pretty entertaining book. And I enjoyed it enough to finish it. But overall I found it unsatisfactory, for a couple reasons.

First of all, the numerous historical misrepresentations. The authors clearly did some research in preparing this book – their image of the Vikings is better, for instance, than that of the History Channel series – but they make a lot of pretty serious mistakes. They think Vikings used two-handed swords. They tell us with straight faces that King Harald’s queen and two daughters died in battle with him at Stamford Bridge (in fact the queen, a delicate Russian princess, stayed home in Norway with the girls). They tell us there was a spell of cold climate in Scandinavia during the Viking Age (the precise opposite of the truth). They seem to think Harald and his men were heathen (they were Christian). They think the 1950s Kirk Douglas movie popularized the idea of winged helmets for Vikings (the image goes back much further, and there are no winged helmets in that movie). They think Vikings sported Norman hair styles.

My second problem is that the sex scenes are far more explicit than called for.

And last but not least, the final resolution is both improbable and unsatisfactory.

Didn’t work for me.

This sounded like fun. A crossover of two very popular and very different fiction series.

It’s well known that Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, was a genuine British intelligence agent during World War II.

It’s probably less well known, but hardly a secret, that J. R. R. Tolkien, creator of The Lord of the Rings, was offered a book deal in Germany previous to World War II, on the condition that he sign a statement to the effect that he had no Jewish blood. He turned the offer down in a letter which is a masterpiece of elegant dismissiveness.

So what if Tolkien had not sent a letter? What if he had actually gone to Berlin on a secret espionage job, assigned to him by the agent Ian Fleming?

That’s the premise of No Dawn for Men. Lots of possibilities here. How would Fleming and Tolkien have gotten along? What would they have said to each other, thought of each other?

Alas, this book does little to illuminate those questions. There is one scene where the two authors talk a bit about their basic values, but it doesn’t really lead anywhere. Fleming and Tolkien follow essentially separate paths through the story, Fleming acting like Bond and Tolkien like… oh, Bilbo Baggins perhaps, though a bit wiser, in a narrative with supernatural elements. He’s even given genuine underground-dwelling dwarves to travel with, which does not add to the credibility of the story.

The two plot threads occupy the page space like oil and water. The whole thing didn’t work very well, in my opinion.

Not awful, but nothing to seek out.

This is spring break week in my graduate courses, so I thought I’d be able to slow down a bit (since of course there’s still class work to catch up on), and do a little blogging.

But lo, I have a translation job to do which is just large enough to maybe fit into the time I’ll have.

But blast it, I’ve been meaning to write this short review, and I’ll write it.

The Inspector Skelgill mysteries, set in England’s Lake District, are another in the currently fashionable sub-genre of the Difficult Detective. The Difficult Detective is brilliant but hard to get along with. Sherlock Holmes was the prototypical Difficult Detective, but Inspector Morse and TV’s “House” (who was indeed based on Holmes) are popular iterations.

Inspector Skelgill is a police detective who might be called “good in the field” — quite literally, since he’s an outdoorsman who resents any minute spent indoors. His favorite spare time activities are fishing on the lakes (he rows his own boat) and “fell running” — that is, running in the mountains. As a result he’s generally running a calorie deficit, which leads him to constantly steal other people’s food — “Are you going to finish those chips?” He also almost never picks up a check. He appear to be moderate on the autism spectrum, a little callous to the feelings of either crime victims, criminals, or his colleagues. He also generally ignores the orders of his superiors, but his success in solving cases secures his job for him — a little past the point of credibility.

The best thing about this series (I’ve read the first three, Murder in Adland, Murder on the Edge, and Murder in School) is the descriptions of the Lake District scenery, lovingly portrayed.

The worst thing, all in all, is Skelgill himself. I got kind of tired of his act after a while, although in the third book he showed some signs of moderating his selfishness. Still, I’ll probably give him a rest for a while.

The usual cautions for language, violence, and adult themes, though nothing excessive by contemporary standards.

The college president pointed to Maximos as an example of the diversity of the college and Maximos would not-so-quietly note that the college had hired nobody else like him since the day his Berkeley degree had fooled them into a bad guess about his views.

A couple weeks ago I “met” Prof. John Mark N. Reynolds, provost of Houston Baptist University, when he and some others interviewed me for a podcast (which will be posted in early March; I’ll let you know). I had such a good time that I decided to check out his books, and found that he’d published a fantasy novel. I bought it for my Kindle, though well aware that academic achievement does not necessarily a good novelist make.

I’m happy to report that Chasing Shadows: Back to Barterra is extremely good.

The main character is Peter Alexis, a university instructor in Rochester, NY, plagued by recurring dreams about the deaths of Czar Nicholas II and his family. A seeming seizure pulls him back to that event so vividly that his friends fear he’ll never regain consciousness in the present. But when he does return, he has begun to remember what happened in his 16th year, when he was king of Barterra, a world in another dimension.

What Reynolds does here (and generally very successfully) is to merge a Charles Williams story with a Narnia story. The events on our world, in the first section, are extremely Williamsian, and convey the same atmosphere. They center on Peter and his Inklingesque circle of friends, a fellowship of Christians. Then they travel to Barterra, faced with the task of undoing Peter’s great failure from his last visit. The book ends with promises of at least one sequel, which I hope will be forthcoming. An odd feature is the considerable use of Eastern Orthodox elements.

I have some criticisms. There were some narrative bumps — confusing scene jumps and occasions when interior monologue went on too long. But taken all in all it was a very good read in the tradition of Williams and Lewis, and I think both those authors would have approved.

Recommended.