“They [the previous generations in the region] had edges and angles, rough sides. You could get hold of them, you could tell what they were. And they weren’t always on the make; they already were something. They weren’t just getting to be something else all the time. They were already human beings.”

“You make them sound pretty ideal,” Magruder said without irony.

“It’s the truth.” She lifted the glass uncertainly to her mouth, she was a little tight. “If it isn’t, it ought to be. It’s what I remember.”

“Really, though, weren’t they pretty ignorant and backward – insulated?”

“All right if they were,” she said. “It’s not any better now; everybody’s insulated now – from everybody else. And still ignorant too; it’s just different, it’s all inside. And everybody’s hiding it; that’s why they look so slick. Do you know what we are? Scared; everybody is.”

America does have fine Christian writers in its recent history, beyond Flannery O’Conner and Walker Percy. It’s just that nobody knows about them. The works of Madison Jones were recommended to me, and I sent away for A Buried Land. It’s a very dense book – written with tremendous craftsmanship, with layers and layers of meaning and symbolism down to the bedrock, which is pretty far down.

Percy Youngblood is a smart young man in a small Tennessee town. When we meet him it’s before World War II, and he and his friend Jesse are working for the Tennessee Valley Authority, helping to build a dam that will flood Percy’s family farm and many others. Percy’s at odds with his father, who can’t see the point of destroying a way of life he likes just fine, in order to create a world he doesn’t want in the first place. Percy takes up with a local girl cast off by his friend Jesse, with unplanned consequences that leave him and Jesse carrying a shared, guilty secret.

After a hiatus in which Percy serves in the war, he returns home to take a job in a local law firm. As he tries to fit in with the town’s progressive set, he’s haunted by his guilt, and terrified because a certain person has come back to town – someone who may or may not suspect him and Jesse’s crime. As in every tragedy, the very actions he takes to protect himself work to his destruction.

A Buried Land is a true work of art as literature, and a harrowing Purgatorio of guilt and sin. It’s a hard read though, because there’s no whimsy here; no moment of relief. The downhill road is a long and oppressive one. Also, I fear that today’s readers will miss the point. Instead of locating the sin in Percy’s heart and actions, they will blame the Puritanism of the times, the laws of the times, and sexist oppression. Which is too bad, because there’s much to learn from this book.

Recommended, if you have the stamina for it. Adult themes, but no major language or explicit scenes to complain of.

It was disastrously easy to make bad horseracing pictures and only possible to do it at bankable level, in my view, if racing became the framing background to human drama.

Although the sentiments above, expressed by Tom Lyon, narrator of Wild Horses, refer to the movie business, they clearly express author Dick Francis’ own approach to writing mysteries. Racing is always the background, but the heart of the story is… well, the human heart.

Thomas Lyon, film director, is a native of Newmarket, Suffolk, England, and he has chosen to come home from California to do his latest film, based on a successful novel inspired by an actual murder that occurred during Tom’s childhood. A horse trainer’s wife was found hanged in a stable, and whether it was homicide or suicide remains a mystery.

The story starts with Tom at the death bed of an old friend, a farrier, who is dying of bone cancer. His friend’s mind is confused, and he makes a confused confession to Tom, thinking him a priest. Throughout the story that follows, Tom feels a strange kind of obligation, as if he were in fact a priest with a duty to God.

Although it’s been decades since the murder the movie is based on happened, it turns out that someone doesn’t want old stones overturned. Tom receives death threats, the film’s star is attacked with a knife, an old lady is wounded, and then there is a murder. And step by step Tom comes to the realization that his friend’s dying confession has a direct bearing on the mystery.

This is Dick Francis at his best. Tom Lyon is a very satisfying hero, ethical, brave, and not overconfident. A particular pleasure of the story is the joke Francis tells on himself (since he’d seen several of his own stories adapted, at least for TV), in making the script writer, also the author of the novel it’s based on, an arrogant, inflexible prima donna who is not as smart as he thinks he is and does nothing but make difficulties.

Only mild cautions for language and subject matter. Highly recommended. Good holiday reading, for instance.

Any author who offers a fresh take on an old genre and carries it off successfully, deserves praise. So all in all I praise Jim Cliff for The Shoulders of Giants, the first volume in a projected new private eye series.

Cliff’s hero and narrator is Jake Abraham, a young private eye just starting out in his own office in Chicago. He says he grew up on Jim Rockford and Spenser, and he’s a little starry-eyed – and aware of it. The novelty of his character is that instead of the expected cynical, hard-boiled sleuth we’ve seen so often, Jake is young and optimistic and not entirely sure of himself – but nevertheless good at his job.

In this story he’s hired by a disgraced former police captain to find his daughter, who has disappeared. Before long her murdered body is found, and then there are more bodies, and soon the police are looking for a serial killer. Because one of the detectives is a friend of his, Jake is allowed to hang around, and even to help (he’s unique among fictional private detectives in actually standing aside and shutting up when the police tell him to), and his inquiries lead him at last into a deadly showdown with a murderer.

Jake is a likeable character, and I generally enjoyed the story. I do have quibbles. Author Cliff seems to have done a fair amount of research on guns, but he doesn’t seem to have much hands on experience – he thinks you’re supposed to shut one eye when aiming, which most instructors will tell you not to do, and he has Jake, in a gunfight in a dark room, waiting for his opponent to talk in order to aim at the voice, when he would have been able to aim at the muzzle flashes. And there are a couple language problems. He doesn’t know what “enormity” means, and he confuses the word “illicit” with “elicit.” He also suggests a murder method to the forensic scientists which I’m pretty sure they would have been familiar with.

Still and all, a good start generally. I like Jake Abraham, and am positively inclined toward the next book. Cautions for the usual language, sex (including a gay bar), and mature themes.

“I don’t think so, but I promised a guy I’d turn myself in. I haven’t got much to sell but a body that’s ready for scrap, a brain that doesn’t work half the time, and my word. I can’t count on the body and brain, but my word has held up pretty well.”

That classically hard-boiled line comes from another of Stuart M. Kaminsky’s comic noirs, You Bet Your Life, in which Toby Peters, threadbare private eye to the stars, does a job for Chico Marx and tangles with Al Capone and Frank Nitti. A certain suave Englishman also shows up, but I’ll just leave him for a surprise.

It’s February, 1941, and Toby Peters has traveled to Florida to ask a favor of Al Capone. A Chicago gangster is threatening to kill Chico Marx, whom he claims owes him a big gambling debt. That’s not unbelievable in Chico’s case, but he swears this isn’t one of his. Capone, only intermittently sane, sends him to Chicago with a recommendation that may or may not do him any good, and before Toby even finishes his train ride, a guy is dead.

Fighting a bad cold all the way, Toby runs down leads through a frigid Windy City, dodging machine gun bullets and encountering mobsters, crooked cops, and a pretty girl who takes him in like a stray dog. Eventually the Marx Brothers show up, and act pretty much like you’d expect them to.

It’s all great fun, especially for lovers of movies and detective stories. I’ve never met a Toby Peters book I didn’t like, and this one was a great time.

The usual cautions for language and adult situations apply. Recommended.

I’ve told you often that, for me at least, Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine is one of the internet’s great pleasures. What should I expect, I wondered, from a novel by Dr. Boli? The result, not really surprisingly, is… a very odd reading experience. Amusing, enigmatic, possibly profound, and even – sometimes – moving, The Crimes of Galahad is a book like no other you will read this year. I’m pretty sure I can say that without fear of contradiction.

The Crimes of Galahad purports to be the memoirs of Galahad Newman Bousted, “the wickedest man in the world.” This is his own account of the misdeeds which brought him to conspicuous wealth and social prominence without anyone, even his wife or his most intimate friends, suspecting his evil machinations.

Galahad Bousted starts out as the son of a humble stationer in 19th Century Allegheny, Pennsylvania. Frustrated in his desire to motivate his father to agree to his plans for expanding the business, he falls under the influence of a French book (not actually the book itself, but a magazine review of it) which convinces him that the only way to achieve success is to devote himself to ruthless evil. In pursuit of this goal, he works long hours, finds ways to please his customers, and makes himself agreeable, even to people he doesn’t like much.

I’m tempted to describe The Crimes of Galahad as a parody, but it’s a parody of a very subtle kind. If I were to try to explain the joke to you, I’d not only spoil it, I’m not sure I’d truly convey the point (I’m not even sure I really figured it out). In a way, the best comment on this book might be to simply read Luke 16:1-9.

This is a book that will be appreciated by extremely intelligent readers (it will help if they’re smarter than me). That recommendation might be bad for sales, I fear, but nevertheless I recommend The Crimes of Galahad.

I read a book about the Shetland Islands quite a few years back, in the ‘80s. I’m interested in the old, remote Viking outposts, and Shetland seemed like the kind of end-of-the world place where a loner like me would be right at home. To judge by Death on a Longship, things have changed since then, mostly because of North Sea oil. The islands are rich now, their inhabitants snug in new houses, with satellite TV and the internet.

The appeal of a story about a murder on a replica Viking ship, against a Shetland backdrop, was irresistible to me, in spite of my old prejudices against women writers (their male characters are often pretty weak), and the fact that this is a story about a woman in a traditional male job – in this case skipper of the Viking ship.

But I was pleasantly surprised. Death On a Longship was a very engaging mystery story, not top drawer but extremely good.

Cass Lynch is the main character and narrator. A native of Shetland, she defied the wishes of her businessman father and (French) opera singer mother to become a sailor. The death of her lover in an accident at sea some years back left her traumatized, but she’s now landed the great opportunity of her life. An American film company wants to make a movie about Gudrid the Far-traveled, an Icelandic saga heroine, in Shetland, and she’s landed the job of captaining the ship. It’s the first time she’s been back in Shetland since she ran away to sea, and there’s some awkwardness in reacquainting herself with old friends, and with her father, who is seeing a young American woman from the film company (her mother returned to France years ago). Continue reading Death on a Longship, by Marsali Taylor →

It’s always embarrassing to admit that I just don’t get a book. But honesty requires me to say that Bye Bye Bertie by Rick Dewhurst pretty much mystifies me. It’s a parody on hard-boiled detective novels, but also a parody on evangelical Christian culture, by a Christian writer. For me, it raised more discomfort than laughter. Maybe I don’t get it because I’m too close to the subject.

Joe LaFlam, the hero and narrator, is a Seattle private eye. A Christian private eye, who lives with his mother and makes his living as a cab driver. Except that his real name is John Doe, and he actually lives in Vancouver, BC, which he insists is Seattle. One day a beautiful (Christian) dame named Brittany Morgan walks into his office, to ask him to find her sister Alberta (Bertie), who has been kidnapped by Druids. He takes the job largely in the hope of winning Brittany as a Christian wife. The hunt leads him on an improbable, slapstick search through Seattle’s (Vancouver’s) back streets, where he encounters a hit man working for a world government conspiracy, who keeps trying (unsuccessfully) to kill him. As well as several other guys who may have been his father (before they were Christians).

It’s all very strange. Lots of jokes are made about popular American Christian culture, which certainly has earned a lot of ribbing.

But I didn’t know how to take the story as a whole. Joe is a sympathetic character, but he’s clueless and heavily delusional. He doesn’t even know what country he’s in. I’m kind of uncomfortable with seeing him set up – it would seem – as some kind of representative evangelical. Maybe we deserve that. But it seemed excessive.

But maybe I just don’t get it.

Suitable for most readers. I can’t either recommend it or dis-recommend Bye Bye Bertie.

This is the third Sean O’Brien novel by Tom Lowe that I’ve read, which tells me that I must like the books. Yet I see all kinds of flaws in them. So I guess the takeaway must be that, for me, Lowe is a natural storyteller with a genuine talent. But he could use some seasoning.

The Butterfly Forest opens, after some preliminaries, with hero Sean O’Brien, a former Miami detective with some kind of mysterious military background, observing a man stalking two women in a mall parking lot. He intervenes to save them from kidnapping, but the assailant gets away. Both women, mother and daughter, are quite attractive, and Sean (a widower) becomes their friend, even pondering asking the mother out. But the predator from the parking lot was not just a crime-of-opportunity pervert. He has the daughter, a student entomologist, in his sights because she saw something she doesn’t even know she saw.

Sean O’Brien is an interesting and engaging character – low-key and laid back, but capable of very efficient violence when it’s needed. Author Lowe has endowed him with a very appealing habitat, dividing his time between an old cabin on the edge of Ocala National Forest and the marina where he keeps his fishing boat, and where good and faithful friends live. He also keeps a pet dachshund, Max, whom he cares for with appealing devotion.

The weaknesses are in the writing. I thought the plotting was better this time than in at least one of the previous books, but I was troubled by repeated infelicities in the prose. People say things like “as you know” in conversation, which real people almost never say. And the exposition is sometimes just awful, as in “His physical periphery subtly spoke of a body language that was rough but understood.”

I blame our times, in a way. In the old days, a good storyteller like Lowe would have paid his dues in the pulp magazines, getting ruthlessly red-penciled by carnivorous editors at 3 cents a word. Then he’d have worked with an equally pitiless editor at a publishing house. But nowadays, publishing his own work, he’s missed professional boot camp, and has no one to tell him when he’s right and when he’s wrong.

And yet I’ve read all three novels. That’s got to mean something.

Another strange thing about the Sean O’Brien series is that the author openly appeals to the spiritual and supernatural. Sean himself says that he’s learned to value his gut feelings above the evidence, which seems strange by the standards of traditional mysteries. He sees visions too, from time to time. I’m not sure if I like this or not.

Moderately recommended. Cautions for language, violence, and adult themes.