Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘To Honour the Dead,’ by John Dean

Leave a comment

Continuing my reading of John Dean’s Inspector Jack Harris series. I don’t love these books, but I guess they’re growing on me. I enjoyed To Honour the Dead.

Jack Harris is a detective in the English Pennine town of Levbridge. He is misanthropic and grumpy, but an effective cop, though a little rough in his methods. (I’m always interested when fictional British cops show aggressive and corner-cutting tendencies. Is the popularity of such stories an indication of public discontent with current real-world policing?)

Remembrance Sunday, the day for honoring the war dead, is approaching, and there’s tension in Levbridge and its neighboring communities. Most of the locals respect those who served, but there are a couple war protestors who promise to disrupt ceremonies. Also somebody has been defacing monuments. Jack Harris finds plenty of people to annoy him in these squabbles – not only the protestors but a local businessman who idolizes his father, who was decorated for service in the Falklands, and seems intent on getting the man’s name on every memorial. Jack is also irritated by a local woman whose son’s recent death was attributed by the coroner to alcohol and freezing weather, but she insists he was murdered, and won’t quit nagging the police about it.

But when a genuine hero – a Victoria Cross winner from World War II, is murdered in his home, Harris and his team soon discover plots and schemes and secrets a-plenty.

Good writing. Interesting (if sometimes annoying) characters. Author Dean is good at misdirection through lies and counterintuitive characterization. Cautions for language, but To Honour the Dead was good entertainment.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Cry Hard, Cry Fast,’ by John D. MacDonald

2 Comments

A horrific multi-car smashup on a four-lane highway forms the narrative center of John D. MacDonald’s 1956 novel, Cry Hard, Cry Fast.

The book begins with a lot of dramatic tension, as we are introduced to several carloads of fragile human beings and informed matter-of-factly that they are about to die. There’s a young businessman mourning his wife, concerned about a thumping in his tire but too preoccupied to stop and get it fixed. A family of four, dominated by an angry father who drives too fast. A young couple trying to save their marriage with a nostalgic vacation. A young woman fleeing a failed affair.  A couple bank robbers in a stolen car, and the girl they picked up, trying to put distance between themselves and the police. An aging truck driver contemplating retirement.

After the accident happens, the survivors (those who are conscious) do their best to start putting their lives together, struggling with guilt, rethinking their plans, or scheming to reclaim lost loot.

Not even John D. MacDonald could knock it out of the park with every book. Cry Hard, Cry Fast isn’t a bad novel, especially considering it was originally meant for the men’s pulp market. It’s certainly more profound than most of its competition. But I felt the treatment here was a little superficial, the characters a little stereotyped, the resolution not as satisfying (especially viewed in the light of changed societal attitudes since this book’s publication) as it might have been.

It was interesting to note (as a native of the era) the changes that have been made in life on the road since 1956 – MacDonald describes “the yellow octagon of the stop sign” and nobody wears seat belts (this book makes a pretty good argument for their use).

Worth reading, but not the top of the crop.

There’s a fair amount of sex in this book, and one troubling scene where a naked 17-year-old girl is described (through her mother’s eyes, but still…)

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Vixen’s Scream,’ by John Dean

Leave a comment

One of the essential problems with the popular subgenre of English Village Police Mysteries is, how many murders can you plausibly set in a small town? You might call it the Midsomer Murders Dilemma. The Vixen’s Scream is only the second in John Dean’s Inspector Jack Harris mysteries, set in the Pennines, so at this point in the series it’s reasonable for our hero to doubt whether a serial killer could be at work in their community, where everybody knows everybody’s business. That doubt will be undermined as the story goes on.

Several “outsiders” have moved into the area (Inspector Harris’ chief subordinate is one of them), and one of the things they need to get used to is the sound of vixens (female foxes) screaming during mating season. The sound is disturbing, almost indistinguishable from the scream of a woman in distress.

One newcomer is a retired London schoolteacher, who keeps badgering the police with reports of women being attacked near her cottage. Inspector Harris, not a patient man, repeatedly informs her that she’s just hearing a vixen’s scream.

Until a young woman is found dead near the teacher’s home, her skull bashed in. And suddenly there are hints that other young women may have been murdered in the area, and Harris has to sort his way through multiple lies and alibis, meanwhile fending off the press, the particular bane of his life.

What I noticed in particular in The Vixen’s Scream was how good the author is at presenting plausible liars. His liars fooled me every time. They provide plenty of misdirection, keeping the puzzle puzzling right to the end.

Pretty good book. No cautions for the reader that I can think of.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Girl In the Meadow,’ by John Dean

Leave a comment

I found, on looking into our archives, that I have actually read and reviewed previous books in the Inspector Jack Harris series by John Dean (an English writer, not the American Watergate figure). I was ambivalent about the two books I reviewed before – Jack Harris as a character does not entirely please me. Still, the books are okay as stories, and I enjoyed The Girl In the Meadow, number 10 in the series.

Near the English village of Levton Bridge stands Meadowview House, an abandoned country property that has recently been acquired by a wildlife trust. Then a strange man suddenly appears to disrupt the proceedings – he claims to be the unacknowledged natural son of the former owner, with a right to inheritance. This rouses the ire of Inspector Harris, an animal lover who used to play in the house with his friends when he was young.

But it becomes a professional matter for him when workers remodeling the house discover a woman’s skeleton concealed under the floor. The mystery of who this woman is, and the repercussions that follow when she is identified, lend increasing dramatic tension to the plot.

John Dean is a good writer, and the story worked out in ways that kept my interest. I continue less than over the moon about Harris himself as a hero – he is tactless, and his subordinates walk on eggshells in discussions, afraid to contradict him. But I think he’s softened a little from the earlier books in the series. I felt the book contained, like so many police mysteries nowadays, an unnecessary surplus of female cops, but that’s my prejudice.

The Girl In the Meadow was an entertaining book. Not much above minimum literary requirements, but fewer and fewer books are up to that minimum these days. So I recommend it.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Íslendingabók, Kristni Saga: The Book of the Icelanders and The Story of the Conversion,’ translated by Siàn Grønlie

Leave a comment

This will not be a review exactly, as I don’t feel qualified to judge a translation from a language I don’t read, and a work of scholarship above my level of erudition.

But to me, it was very interesting to read Íslendingabók, Kristni Saga: The Book of the Icelanders and The Story of the Conversion, translated by Siàn Grønlie, published by the Viking Society for Northern Research. My friend Dale Nelson gave me my copy a while back.

What we’re dealing with here is heavily annotated translations of two different books, quite short, which deal with the conversion of the Icelanders. We know the author of the first book, the Book of the Icelanders, Ari þorgilsson, who is considered by some the father of Icelandic history. The author of the second, more detailed book, The Story of the Conversion, is an unknown churchman. The books center on one of the most famous events in northern history – the decision of the Icelandic Althing to peacefully adopt the Christian religion. Ari’s account seems to be primarily aimed at telling the story of his own prominent family, while the author of The Story of the Conversion seems more concerned with spreading the glory around to several of the prominent families.

The thing that I particularly noticed was the passage in The Story of the Conversion (a story familiar also from Heimskringla) that told about the incident in Trondheim where King Olaf Trygvesson, offended by the Icelanders’ outlawing of his missionary Thangbrand, arrested a group of Icelanders. He was persuaded not to harm them before one of their number could go to Iceland and get their countrymen to convert. I noticed that one of the men listed in this group was Thorarin Nefjolfsson, whom you may recall is a character in my novels West Oversea and King of Rogaland. I thought at first that this was fresh information, but a look at Heimskringla informs me that Thorarin is listed there too – I just never noticed him before.

It seems likely that Thorarin stayed in King Olaf’s retinue, and that may have been where he met Erling Skjalgsson. But I have them meet in Iceland in West Oversea, and give them a dramatic adventure together. And I think that was appropriate in terms of fiction. I felt that Thorarin’s bond of loyalty to Erling had to be a particularly strong one, in order for him to take the extraordinary risks he took to help rescue Asbjorn Selsbane for Erling.

I read somewhere – without a source cited – that Thorarin died with Olaf Haraldsson at the Battle of Stiklestad. I’d like to know how he retained Olaf’s favor after pulling such a stunt.

Anyway, this book is an impressive work of scholarly translation, and is recommended for serious students of Icelandic history and the sagas. Not light reading.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Trouble Is My Business,’ by Raymond Chandler

Leave a comment

“Her eyes were wide-set and there was thinking room between them.”

“I felt terrible. I felt like an amputated leg.”

“He had his right hand in the side pocket of the coat, and under the derby a pair of scarred eyebrows and under the eyebrows a pair of eyes that had as much expression as the cap on a gas tank.”

Apparently I have already read all the stories in Trouble Is My Business, a collection of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe short stories, since they are taken from the collection, The Simple Art of Murder which I know I read a while back. But I didn’t remember them, and so had the pleasure of discovery all over again.

The stories included in this particular collection are “Trouble Is My Business,” “Finger Man,” “Goldfish,” and “Red Wind.” These stories were not, in fact, originally Marlowe stories at all (according to Wikipedia), but pulp stories Chandler wrote about a couple other detective characters, adapted to cash in on Marlowe’s popularity. Which relieves me a little, because the hero of “Trouble Is My Business” has a serious drinking problem. I mean, Philip Marlowe certainly liked his booze, but this guy (John Dalmas, according to the listing in Wikipedia) is putting it away at a rate that indicates serious maintenance alcoholism, and I wouldn’t give his liver many more years.

One doesn’t go to Raymond Chandler for great plotting. We read him mostly for his characters and his prose and his evocation of a time and place. I didn’t think the writing here was up to Chandler’s very best standards, but there are plenty of good lines: “She wasn’t beautiful, she wasn’t even pretty, but she looked as if things would happen where she was.”

Objectionable material was mostly limited to racial slurs. The cursing was mainly the sort of thing you hear in old movies, like “Nerts!” There’s no sex as such, though there’s plenty of sexual tension – at one point Marlowe kisses a married woman, and the author skips describing the actual kiss in the same way later writers would skip a sex scene.

I had a blast reading Trouble Is My Business. Recommended for hard-boiled fans.

Authors, Non-fiction, Reviews

‘P.G. Wodehouse In His Own Words,’ by Barry Day and Tony Ring

Leave a comment

I took to American food from the start like a starving Eskimo flinging himself on a portion of blubber. The poet Keats, describing his emotions on first reading Chapman’s Homer, speaks of himself as feeling like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken. Precisely so did I feel … when the waiter brought me my first slab of strawberry shortcake … ‘No matter if it puts an inch on my waistline,’ I said to myself, ‘I must be in on this.’

There are biographies of P.G. Wodehouse out there; I haven’t gotten around to reading any of them. But a deal showed up on P.G. Wodehouse In His Own Words, and I figured I’d give it a try. It’s neither a long nor greatly illuminating work, but it is an opportunity to revisit a lot of Wodehouse’s best stuff, which can’t help being entertaining.

The scheme here is to go through the facts of the author’s biography, relating them to various quotations from his works. This book’s authors, Barry Day and Tony Ring, admit that we don’t know for sure how Wodehouse’s thinking worked, and we can’t always rely on his own statements on the subject – he considered himself rather a dull fellow, and embroidered his statements accordingly.  But overall I think I learned a little reading it.

There isn’t a lot of drama in the story, except of course for the lamentable account of Wodehouse and his wife being detained by the Germans during World War II, and his grievous error in making recordings that the Germans used for propaganda. This mistake resulted in his never returning to England (though he could have gone back after a time, and the queen knighted him in absentia), but becoming a US citizen. The authors take what I consider the correct view – that Wodehouse dropped a brick but merely through thoughtlessness. And regretted it.

I did notice one error in the book. The authors believe (no doubt deceived by Jeeves’s glamor) that valets stand higher in the social order “Downstairs” than butlers. This is wrong. The butler was king of the servants in an aristocratic household. If Bertie had married and set up a stately home, I expect Jeeves would have been promoted to that lofty office.

But otherwise, I had a good time with P.G. Wodehouse In His Own Words. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Mr. Mulliner Speaking,’ by P. G. Wodehouse

Leave a comment

People who enjoyed a merely superficial acquaintance with my nephew Archibald (said Mr. Mulliner) were accustomed to set him down as just an ordinary pinheaded young man. It was only when they came to know him better that they discovered their mistake. Then they realized that his pin-headedness, so far from being ordinary, was exceptional.

Most P. G. Wodehouse readers are familiar with the Jeeves stories, and usually with the Blandings Castle stories too. But there is another substantial series of short stories that sometimes gets overlooked. These are the Mr. Mulliner stories, in which the venerable Mr. Mulliner sits with his drink in the bar parlor of a pub called The Angler’s Rest, regaling his audience with stories of the adventures of his innumerable relations. Often these stories involve a feckless young man of the usual Wodehouse type, who overcomes some obstacle to his marriage to the girl he loves. Usually the solution to the problem is purely nonsensical, based on some character’s unexpected personal quirks. The quality of the mirth varies from story to story, but some of Wodehouse’s best flights of fancy can be found in this category.

About half the stories in this volume, Mr. Mulliner Speaking, however, exhibit a different formula. This is because (and I was not aware of this, having not read these particular stories before) one of Mr. Mulliner’s relatives turns out to be a certain Miss Roberta Wickham. “Bobbie” Wickham is a character who pops up from time to time in the Jeeves/Wooster stories, and may have shown up at Blandings Castle too (I can’t recall). But whenever Bobbie appears, a different pattern is called for. Because marriage to Bobbie Wickham is always regarded as a fate to be dreaded, rather like running afoul of one of Bertie Wooster’s aunts.

For the red-haired Bobbie, in spite her extreme beauty, is a sort of benevolent sociopath. She never means to hurt anyone, but she has absolutely no self-control or sense of responsibility, and she generally drops her suitors into some kind of a nightmare situation, like being mistaken for a burglar by a butler with a shotgun, perhaps, or being forced to climb out of a high window with the aid of knotted-together bed sheets. If you find public humiliation hilarious, these are the stories for you.

Mr. Mulliner Speaking is a very funny book. I recommend it. My e-book version featured a number of OCR spelling errors that should have been caught and corrected.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Treasure of Tundavala Gap,’ by Jeffrey K. Schmoll

Leave a comment

Author Jeffrey K. Schmoll is a recent acquaintance of mine on X, and I bought his book out of curiosity. The Treasure of Tundavala Gap is not exactly in my usual line, being a story about twenty-somethings and adventure in Africa. Nevertheless, I was increasingly drawn in as I read.

Mateus de Silva is a brilliant physics student working on his doctorate in Texas. He is also the orphaned son of a Cuban exile, and grandson of a well-known Cuban general who was lost fighting in Angola. He has a cocaine habit as well, one which he tells himself he has under control. He also suffers from crippling shyness. His two best friends are his gaming buddies, wealthy Tay and female computer whiz Munie.

When Mateus gets a call to go to Cuba, he’s reluctant to go. He’s informed that his great-grandmother is dying, and she wishes to speak to him. But why should he go? She considers him a bastard and has rebuffed all his previous attempts to make contact.

But she is his only family, so he makes the trip. The woman is fading fast, but makes sure a certain cigar box is placed in his hands. Examining it at home, he is intrigued by a poem included among his grandfather’s letters from Angola to his grandmother. He and his friends put their heads (and computers) together to analyze it, finally realizing it’s a clue to the location of a great treasure.

Soon Mateus and Tay are off to Africa, where they will face crime and corruption, betrayal, romance, and sacrifice. Mateus will discover qualities in himself he never guessed at – and he’ll need them.

The Treasure of Tundavala Gap wasn’t a flawless novel. The author’s prose is adequate – quite good compared to a lot of stuff I’ve read recently – but not memorable. Occasionally he misplaces modifiers, but not too often.

The action is sometimes improbable, but that’s a commonplace in contemporary thrillers. Film tropes show up – the classic bullet wound in the shoulder that’s not all that incapacitating, and when the treasure is found, they feel compelled to examine it by pouring it all out in a visually compelling way rather than just dipping into the sack. But those are small things.

The story was exciting, and filled with twists and turns. The villains were particularly well-done, three-dimensional, and that’s a hard trick for a writer. I was worried for a while that the Cuban Communists looked too romantic, but the author fixed that. I was troubled by the hero’s use of cocaine, even if it diminished as he grew in character. But sequels are promised; perhaps that’s a victory reserved for a future story.

All in all, I recommend The Treasure of Tundavala Gap. A very impressive and exciting first novel.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Hero at the End of His Rope,’ by Jason P. Hunt

3 Comments

I don’t generally read space opera, but I picked up this book on a whim, out of Sarah Hoyt’s regular book plugs. The Hero at the End of His Rope is actually a novella. Author Jason P. Hunt wrote it, he explains in his Introduction, according to a plan to make each chapter precisely 800 words long.

Richard Thorpe is our hero, a sort of a Han Solo character. As the story opens, we learn that he’s wanted by the authorities. Apparently he has blown up a planet. The reasons for this extreme action are revealed gradually as the story goes on, as are his motives for wanting revenge against a powerful space gangster, his former employer.

As he flees in his spacecraft, he is assisted by an alien friend and his redheaded girlfriend, who proves to have a secret of her own. One feels the influences of Star Wars and Star Trek in the faster-than-light speed chases and the banter among the characters here.

The Hero at the End of His Rope is light entertainment, and succeeds at that purpose. I personally was not happy with the format – each chapter precisely the same length. Such strictures prevent an author making the best use of his words – I have often quoted Lincoln, who said that a man’s legs should be long enough to reach the ground. Likewise, a chapter ought to be precisely long enough to do its narrative job, no more nor less.

But overall my response is favorable. Worth the price.