Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Girl In the Meadow,’ by John Dean

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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

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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

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“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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Embers of the Hands,’ by Eleanor Barraclough

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I like to think I keep relatively up to date on Viking studies, both for my writing and for my second life as a Viking reenactor. But as Dunning and Kruger have taught us, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know – and I think I’ve learned to settle for being better informed than most people, to keep up with the state of the art as stuff gets published for popular consumption.

So I bought Embers of the Hands by Eleanor Barraclough, which was recommended to me by a couple friends. And I have to say it’s an impressive book within the limits of its intended purpose.

Embers of the Hands pairs well with Kat Jarman’s River Kings, which I reviewed a while back. Like that book, it considers the Viking world through examination and analysis of archaeological artifacts. But Jarman’s book centered on one artifact (a bead), while Barraclough uses a number of artifacts to elucidate various aspects of the Viking world.

The emphasis here is on ordinary life – the way the people who weren’t famous lived. The clues given us by the things they used and left behind , that enable us – to some extent – to look at their world through their eyes. Author Barraclough possesses a happy gift for description and empathetic thought.

And that gift is needed, because I feel I must admit that I found the book rather dull in stretches. Most of us were lured into Viking studies by way of romantic dreams, of adventure and heroism. Embers of the Hands is pretty relentlessly unromantic. This approach is an excellent corrective for people like me – writers and reenactors. I think it will have more trouble holding the casual reader, who may be looking for bigger and more colorful stories.

Still, it’s a well-researched and well-written book, and ought to be read and pondered by its intended audience.

I might mention that the author seems not much interested in the contentious issue of shield maidens, and I was very grateful to her for that.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Engine House,’ by Rhys Dylan

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It’s nice to run into a professional writer these days, one who knows how to lay out a sentence and to spell, and who has a feel for settings and character. All that describes Rhys Dylan’s work in The Engine House, first installment in a series featuring retired Detective Inspector Evan Warlow of Pembrokeshire in Wales.

The story opens with a landslide that uncovers a hidden cave near a cliffside path. Revealed now are the bodies of a pair of hikers who disappeared more than seven years ago. And this was no death by misadventure – the couple had been beaten to death and stuffed into the hole.

Which leads to a call to Evan Warlow, retired chief inspector. He was a successful detective before his early retirement, and he worked on the missing persons’ case. He is reluctant to get involved – for reasons not revealed in this book to his colleagues or to the reader – but at last his great curiosity and the passion he’d invested in the mystery lure him back onto the job. On a temporary basis.

He’s set to work with Inspector Jess Allanby, a highly regarded woman detective. They form a task force to re-open the old files in light of the new discoveries. And the things they discover – and have a hard time discovering – are troubling.

Meanwhile, a young couple has moved into the old house where the deceased couple had lived. They’re creative and eager, though the young woman is disturbed by a sense of being watched, from somewhere on the other side of the ravine, near where the old, derelict Engine House stands in ruin. (The story flirts with the paranormal here, but doesn’t go too far in that direction.)

I have only praise for the writing and storytelling here. Rhys Dylan knows what he’s doing as a novelist.

My own personal reservations rise from a hint – and it’s really only a hint – of conventional stereotyping in the story. The author doesn’t go as far as to suggest – as so many modern novels seem to – that the police force is actually “gender-balanced,” but the team we follow is half male and half female. And it annoyed me when Jess (Inspector Allanby) reprimands Evan for trying to shield her with his body when they’re threatened with a firearm. Blast it, protecting women is what we men do. There’s not much excuse for our existence otherwise.

Also, the scenes set in the present are written in the present tense, something I object to on stubborn principle.

So I probably won’t read on in the series, but that shouldn’t stop you. The Engine House is really a very good police procedural, in a picturesque and exciting setting. I do recommend it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Lieberman’s Choice,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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I have made no effort to read Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Lieberman books in chronological order. So reading Lieberman’s Choice slings me back almost to the beginning – it’s the second in the series. Rather unlike the others; Abe Lieberman himself is almost a peripheral character here, though a consistently present one.

Bernie Shepard, a Chicago police detective, shoots his wife and her lover (another cop) to death one day. Then he climbs to the roof of his apartment building, where he has already constructed a bunker of concrete blocks. He informs the police that he has rigged bombs around himself. He will blow up a good chunk of the city, he says, unless Detective Alan Kearney, whom he blames for turning his wife into a “whore,” comes to meet him on the roof in the early morning.

The story follows as Abe and his partner Bill Hanrahan assist in countermeasures, not always strictly legal ones, meanwhile dealing with a crazy man (sadly, a crazy evangelical Christian) who is abusing his wife and child. Also we follow the mayor as he struggles with his conscience on one side and political calculation on the other. And, as always, Lieberman has quiet domestic drama within his own family.

It all ends in a sort of High Noon showdown, but one where truth is the chief weapon.

Lieberman’s Choice is good, consistent Kaminsky stuff. Recommended.