Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Bad Man,’ by Stanley Elkin

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“If the question is can I take it, the answer is no. Regularity is what I know best. I have contributed to the world’s gloom, I acknowledge that. But I have always picked on victims. Victims are used to it. Irregularity is what they know best. They don’t even feel it. I feel it. It gives me the creeps.”

I picked up Stanley Elkin’s A Bad Man by mistake, thinking I was getting a book by some other author. But, having bought it, I gave it a chance. It wasn’t exactly my kind of book, and Elkin isn’t my kind of author, but I can’t deny the book was unexpectedly entertaining.

Think of Kafka’s “The Trial.” Think of Catch-22. Think (a little) of the Book of Job. That’s what A Bad Man is like, sort of.

Leo Feldman is a self-made man. He built his peddler father’s pushcart business up into a large department store – chiefly through black market dealing during World War II. He did not serve himself, due to a congenital health problem – the fetus of a vestigial twin, lodged in his chest next to his heart. If it ever moves, it could kill him.

In the basement of his store, he ran an off-the-books business – not retail, but trading favors, providing referrals to illegal services – abortions, or drugs, or prostitutes. So he was not greatly surprised when the police came for him one day.

He ends up in a penitentiary without a real-world analogue – a modern, high-security complex located in a large tract of no-man’s land. He discovers that the prisoners’ lives are governed by strict rules laid down by the god-like Warden – strict but fluid rules, constantly changing, sometimes mutually contradictory. Whenever Feldman thinks he’s found a way to get by, the Warden stymies him, and once again he finds himself alone, an outcast among outlaws.

What makes the book fascinating is its dark comedy. None of the major characters is really sympathetic. Feldman is, as the Warden terms him, “a bad man.” He has lived a life of greed and petty cruelties. The Warden is god-like, but he’s a petty god – loveless and cruel in his own way. Thus all Feldman’s misfortunes and sufferings are deserved, and often poetic. But the system itself is just as cruel.

Stanley Elkins’ style does a lot to make A Bad Man a fun read. He delights in puns and plays on words – “Little children suffered him.” When the Warden speaks of a small grove of trees he has provided for the inmates’ recreation, he says, “This is your copse, you robbers…!”

What is this book about? It may be a cosmic complaint about the world – the Warden may, indeed, be meant to represent God. It may be a satire on America, from a Jewish perspective. It may be a liberal satire on capitalism.

Whatever it is, I found A Bad Man surprisingly entertaining, far more than I would have expected if I’d known what I was buying. Recommended, for literate grownups.

Fiction, Reviews

‘After That, the Dark,’ by Andrew Klavan

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He was thinking about this when the waiter brought the check to him. Gwendolyn made a motion toward her purse.

“Now, now,” he said, “don’t try any of that twenty-first-century stuff with me.”

“You’re right, she said. “It’s a rotten century. I only stay for the antibiotics.”

It has become a tradition for me to purchase and savor each new Cameron Winter book by Andrew Klavan as soon as it comes out, and to tell the world what a pleasure that annual event has become in my life. After That, the Dark is the fifth in the series, and I enjoyed it, though (I must admit) a little less than I expected. That is for reasons which author Klavan has no doubt anticipated and discounted in his own mind. I’ll get to that.

Cameron Winter, our continuing hero, is a former assassin for a super-secret government division which no longer exists. After its dissolution, he reinvented himself as an English professor, He now teaches at a small college somewhere in the Midwest.

A thread that ties the books together is his conversations with his psychologist Margaret, who is helping him work through his old traumas and sins. Recently she has been particularly interested in his relationship (or reluctance to initiate a relationship) with Gwendolyn Lord, a widow he met a couple books ago, with whom he struck immediate sparks.

In After That, the Dark, Cameron finally asks her out, only to be blindsided by how well it goes. The two are not simply compatible – they click together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. And in this story, the investigation is sparked, not as usual by Cameron’s sixth sense for hidden mysteries in crimes in the news, but by a puzzle posed by Gwendolyn herself. She tells him about a friend who works in a prison, where a “locked room” murder occurred. A prisoner, who had been strip-searched, is found shot to death with a nail gun in a padded, locked cell.

Cameron goes to the prison town to look into the matter. He is not aware that he’s at the center of a conspiracy, among the moves and countermoves of highly placed, faceless, ruthless chess players. Cameron is a gifted operative, and he’ll need all his gifts to survive this one.

Was After That, the Dark fun to read? Sure was. Was it as good as its predecessors? Maybe not quite – I’m not sure.

My main problem was moral. Gwendolyn, Cameron’s new love interest, is an open and devoted Christian. Yet (minor spoiler alert) she falls straight into bed with him at the first opportunity. I could have understood that plot point if it were treated as a mistake, but in the aftermath she justifies it, saying that they were clearly made for each other by God, so it must be okay.

Andrew Klavan is a wise and perceptive writer. Surely he’s aware that everybody who’s ever fallen in love feels exactly the same way.

It should be noted that Klavan is a convert to Christianity, and comes to the topic from a different angle than “cradle Christians” like me. Also that these books are not intended as “Christian fiction” in the same way that the average CBA book is.

Nevertheless, that rationalization for premarital sex is, in my opinion, too predictable and conventional for a writer of Andrew Klavan’s considerable wisdom.

Otherwise, highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Gun Man Jackson Swagger,’ by Stephen Hunter

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“That’s the problem with battle,” said Jack. “You must kill the people who most impress you.”

When Stephen Hunter sets his hand to writing a Western, he does not skimp. The Gun Man Jackson Swagger would make an epic movie, like “High Plains Drifter,” but on steroids and with CGI. Sam Eliot should star.

When the man who calls himself Jack rides onto the Crazy R ranch in Arizona, on a summer day in a year of drought, he’s just a starved old man on a starved horse. But he offers superior horsemanship skills, and so they take him on.

The Crazy R manages to survive as a business, in these hard times, through purchasing stolen Mexican army supplies, a portion of which they sell in the camp called Railhead No. 4. Railhead No. 4 is like other railroad Hells on Wheels, except more corrupt and cruel.

Jack has business with the Crazy R outfit. He also has business with Railhead No. 4, and with a bizarre army of revolutionaries led by a fanatic Frenchman, training in the desert. What is one man against so many? Quite a lot, when the man is Jackson Swagger.

As with any of Stephen Hunter’s novels about the Swagger family, a fair amount of suspension of disbelief is necessary here. But those willing to so suspend will be rewarded by a gripping and moving tale, a genuine epic.

I had some quibbles. Jack “slap-fires” his Colt pistol, which I take to mean what’s usually called “fanning,” and am reliably informed never happened in a Wild West gunfight – the author admits in his Afterword that he saw a modern shooter do a trick with it and had to put it in a book.

There’s also a scene where a villain rapes a respectable white woman – something I also understand never happened in the West, in those days. One assumes the author is catering to modern audience expectations.

Those nitpicks aside, I devoured The Gun Man Jackson Swagger, and recommend it highly, with cautions for some pretty raw action.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Down These Streets,’ by James Scott Bell

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He was my height—six feet—but if I curled up I could have fit into his chest.

I’m not a big fan of short story collections. Short stories are fine in their natural habitat, taken one at a time. But in bunches I find them bumpy reading – I get invested in a couple characters, and then they find their destinies and I have to jump into somebody else’s life.

Still, I do enjoy James Scott Bell’s writing. So I figured I’d pick up Down These Streets, his big (and I mean big – north of 700 pages) short story collection. (The title is inspired by a famous line from Raymond Chandler’s essay, “The Simple Art of Murder.”) He pretty much throws in everything, from hard-boiled tales to “twist” stories in the O. Henry tradition, to a series of light action stories about a hard-luck boxer named Irish Jim Gallagher (inspired by Robert E. Howard’s Sailor Steve Costigan), to flash fiction, including a few that are just re-tellings of old jokes.

I liked the hard-boiled stuff. The Irish Jim stories were fun, particularly one long in which the world, the devil, and the majesty of the law seem to have conspired to prevent his keeping an important date with his girl (this story, amazingly, features cameo appearances by both Marilyn Monroe and Dr. J. Vernon McGee – and how many stories can make that claim?).

Many of the shorter stories seemed to me rather slapdash, but they didn’t take long to read.

I didn’t love Down These Streets, but it kept me entertained for several days, and you may enjoy short stories more than I do.

Recommended. No profanity.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Romeo’s Truth,’ by James Scott Bell

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I always look forward to a new entry in James Scott Bell’s Mike Romeo series. The latest volume, Romeo’s Truth, is (as I announced yesterday) adorned by a quotation from a review I did, on this blog, of a previous installment, placed first among the review blurbs at the front. Proving that not only is author Bell a good writer, but he recognizes fine criticism.

Mike Romeo, if you aren’t yet familiar with him, is a very big, strong man. He’s a former cage fighter and a self-educated genius. He goes about doing good in the world, kicking butt and quoting the classics.

In Romeo’s Truth, Mike is on a job for Ira, his lawyer boss, when he stops at a diner in California’s Central Valley. He observes a big guy beating up a little guy in the parking lot and (of course) steps in. This is the inciting incident that will soon have him involved in a simmering dispute between a local rancher and anti-meat agitators (in case you’re wondering, this book is entirely on the side of the carnivores). Soon his lawyer will have a new client (the little guy who got beat up, up on a murder charge), and a great need to tear the cover off a conspiracy of people who do not hesitate to blow up buildings or shoot people. No matter – getting Mike Romeo mad is one of the classic strategic errors.

Romeo’s Truth isn’t the best of the series, but it’s plenty of fun – a fine entry in a series which provides the joys of hard-boiled detective stories for audiences who prefer their fiction clean. Mike’s relationship with his new wife, Sophie, sometimes approaches the realm of the cutesy, but never goes quite that far. Self-awareness saves them from that.

My only real quibble is with a “fact” delivered in a throwaway line – Mike says that the Vikings had double-headed axes, which isn’t true.

That is, of course, unforgiveable. But otherwise, it’s a great story.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Turn On the Heat,’ by Erle Stanley Gardner

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I suppose the kids today don’t even know who Erle Stanley Gardner was (even though he was once the bestselling author in the world). But my generation, who did know about him, generally got him wrong, I think. This was due to the blockbuster popularity of the Perry Mason TV show, based on his books about that character. The show (though well done and still fun to watch) was slightly bowdlerized. The original Mason of the novels had rougher edges, especially in the early stages.

That goes equally – or more – for his Bertha Cool and Donald Lamm books, of which Turn On the Heat (published 1940) was my first experience. This is pure hardboiled stuff, but handled from a new angle – a hardboiled story without a hardboiled hero.

Bertha Cool is a stout, middle-aged woman, tight with a buck. She runs a private investigations agency in Los Angeles, and her chief operative is former lawyer Donald Lamm. Lamm is tough in his own way, but he’s only a little guy. When the muscle boys work him over (which happens more than once), he bides his time and finds clever ways to get his revenge.

They are hired by a man to find his ex-wife, who disappeared 21 years previously. Donald goes to the town where they once lived. She’s not there anymore, and nobody seems to know where she went. But as he pokes around, Donald discovers that pretty much everybody is lying to him – including their client. A perky female reporter seems to be a useful ally, but a big, brutal police detective invites him – forcefully – to get out of town. It will take a lot of brains and strategizing to finally close this case, but Bertha and Donald have what it takes.

Turn On the Heat was a lot of fun. Pure entertainment for hard-boiled fans. Recommended.

Authors, Bookselling, Reviews

I am now a blurber

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What was my surprise to open up James Scott Bell’s latest Mike Romeo novel, Romeo’s Truth, and find that one of my own reviews on this blog was quoted as the very first blurb at the front of the book?

James Scott Bell has produced gold in the Mike Romeo series, about a one-time cage fighter and certified genius on a quest for virtue. I want to be Mike Romeo when I get younger. Highly recommended.

My thanks to author Bell. I’m enjoying Romeo’s Truth.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Lion of Cairo,’ by Scott Oden

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The friend who gave me a copy of Scott Oden’s The Lion of Cairo told me, “I’ve never read an author who reminded me so much of Robert E. Howard.”

And he was right. In terms of setting and atmosphere, this is a very Howardian book. Gilded palaces inhabited by scheming courtiers contrast with dark, fetid alleyways infested by thieves, beggars, and cutthroats. The setting is very exotic, very romantic (in the sense of adventure in faraway lands). Author Oden makes no secret of his indebtedness to Robert E. Howard and of his intention to produce a story in that Weird Tales tradition.

And yet, it didn’t work for me.

Our antihero is Assad, a member of the Assassins cult. He is a skilled and remorseless murderer, armed with a long Afghani knife forged by a magician, possessed by an angry, vengeful spirit.

He is assigned to go to Cairo to protect Rashid, the caliph, who is dominated and manipulated by his ambitious vizier, Jalal. Jalal has made a treacherous pact with the Syrians and the “Nazarenes” (Christians) to deliver the city into their hands, in return for his own political advancement.

The only friend Rashid has in the palace is unknown to him – a minor member of the harem named Parysatis. She has discovered secret passages in the walls that allow her to eavesdrop on conversations. She knows what Jalal is planning, but to whom can she turn for help?

It all sounds pretty gripping, but it didn’t work for me. No doubt much of the problem is my sheer, provincial inability to sympathize with Islamic aspirations. In spite of the way the story was set up, I was still rooting for the Christians. (The author assumes the widely-held contemporary trope that the Crusaders were barbarians who ran around massacring everybody, while the Muslims were sophisticated and compassionate. We are often reminded that the Christians massacred the citizens of Jerusalem when they captured it, while Saladin spared them when he did the same. This is historical cherry-picking. There were rules of warfare, recognized by both sides, which governed when a city could be put to the sword or not. Saladin massacred cities on other occasions.)

But the book was also a little light on sympathetic characters. Assad is a stone-cold killer. The caliph is (at least at first) disengaged and addicted to drugs. Parysatis is a good character, but she shares the stage with a lot of other people, and has limited opportunities for taking initiative.

Also, author Oden is frequently weak in his word choices. Often he fails to say precisely what he’s trying to say. For instance, he tends to use “a sense of” when he means “an impression of.”

I’m afraid I found The Lion of Cairo something of a chore to read. The epilogue seems to suggest that a sequel will be coming, but I won’t be looking for it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Man in the Arena,’ by David Tindell

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I was with a group of guys from my church last evening, and one of them told me he’d started reading one of my books. He said, “I was wondering, ‘How come we don’t have these in our church library?’ And then I read the first page….”

I assumed he was talking about The Year of the Warrior, which begins, as you may recall, with a rape.

That goes to the ongoing issue of how much realism we can allow in Christian literature. I assume this question also faced David Tindell, author of The Man in the Arena. I’m not entirely convinced he got the balance right.

Scott Armstrong, our hero, is a former Air Force Special Tactics officer, whose career was cut short when, in a bad situation, he made the morally right choice rather than the politically prudent one. Now he’s back home in Wisconsin, middle-aged and fit, wondering what he’s going to do with the rest of his life.

He begins to find an answer when he meets Beth, a local single mother. They quickly fall in love, and he starts to act as a father figure to Emily, her beautiful, athletic teenaged daughter.

They have no way of knowing that drug dealers in the area are planning to move into the lucrative business of human trafficking – and they’ve set their sights on Emily for their first abduction and sale. Scott will need all his combat skills, as well as all the principles of character he learned growing up, to protect his nascent family.

The writing in The Man in the Arena wasn’t bad, in terms of word use. But the author tends to talk too much, and the story takes a long time before getting into the action.

But what really threw me for a loop is the presence, in a book which seems to be purposefully Christian (it includes a scene of a pastor sharing the gospel clearly with a misguided young man) of a sex scene that’s borderline porn. I’m not saying you absolutely can’t have any kind of sex scene in a Christian book, but this one got way more explicit and detailed than I was comfortable with.

So I’m not sure I can recommend The Man in the Arena. The author shows promise, though, and ought to keep at it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Made in Blood,’ by W. H. Clark

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Way back in 2015, I found W. H. Clark’s first novel, and praised it in these words:

The book under consideration here is an example of a type of novel I like very much. It’s a “small” mystery, localized and character-driven. No international conspiracies; no shadowy government agents. 

In 2022, I reviewed his second novel positively, though I complained that it was rather dark.

My imagination suggests to me that author Clark must have seen my 2015 review and hated it, because he seems to have designed his third novel, Made in Blood, to counter almost everything I said in praise in my first review. Made in Blood is a far-flung mystery, covering a lot of territory. It concentrates on international conspiracies and shadowy government agents. (I’ll concede that it was pretty character-driven, though.)

“Ward,” (he never explains whether it’s his first or last name), our continuing hero, was once a sniper in the Afghanistan war. Later he was a Texas Ranger, and now he’s a cop in Montana. He’s still recovering from the trauma of his last case when he gets cryptic phone call from a stranger. He immediately understands the message. His old friend, his one-time Army spotter Randall, has been killed. It will now be Ward’s job to avenge him.

The story that follows ranges episodically over a lot of country and time. Periods of inactivity will be punctuated with violence, abductions, and torture. Long flashbacks will tell us what happened to him in Afghanistan. Ward will kill men. Women will flirt with him, but he’ll brush them off. He will uncover an ugly story of war profiteering, political corruption, and ruthless terrorism.

I found Made in Blood a little implausible. The character of Randall was so extreme as to challenge belief. The fact that the author strayed into politics did not charm me, though I stayed with the story to the ending – an ending which I found just creepy.

On the plus side, the writing, as always before, was quite good. Though the author is English, he handles American idiom extremely well – except that he seems not to know that what he calls a “catapult” is known as a slingshot over here.

I’m done with W. H. Clark. He’s a good writer, but I’m not interested in what he’s selling these days.